[1] Since 10 April 2019 he has been in pretrial detention, due to an ongoing investigation on corruption, money laundering, and connections to Odebrecht, a public works company accused of paying bribes.

[2] Pedro Pablo Kuczynski was born in the Miraflores District of Lima to parents who fled from Germany after the Nazis came to power.

[7][8] On 15 December 2017, the Congress of Peru, which was controlled by the opposition Popular Force, initiated impeachment proceedings against Kuczynski, after he was accused of lying about receiving payments from the scandal-hit Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht in the mid-2000s.

[18] Entering Peru in 1936, Maxime Kuczyński sent his son to be educated first in Lima at Markham College, and then in Lancashire in England at Rossall School, where he was a pupil in the Maltese Cross House between 1953 and 1956.

He began his career at the World Bank in 1961 as a regional economist for six countries in Central America, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Kuczynski went into exile in the United States in 1969 due to political persecution after Belaunde's government fell to the military dictatorship of General Juan Velasco Alvarado in a coup d'état.

In 1992, he founded, with six other partners, the Latin American Enterprise Fund (LAEF) in Miami, Florida, a private equity firm that focused on investments in Mexico, Central and South America.

[23] In 1980, following the election of Fernando Belaúnde Terry as president, Kuczynski was invited to return to Peru to serve as Minister of Energy and Mines.

In this position, he sponsored Law 23231 which, through tax exemptions and other incentives, promoted oil and gas exploration and exploitation after a period of relative neglect.

During the second round of the 2016 presidential campaign, he claimed that he had left Peru due to the threats and attacks from the Shining Path insurgent group: "Let's remember that the terrorists not only hung my effigy on the zanjón (a local denomination for Paseo de La República avenue in Lima) and in San Martín square, but they attacked my apartment.

[29] After working with the Toledo administration, Kuczynski founded Agua Limpia, a Peruvian non-governmental organization that provides drinking water systems to communities in Peru.

After a judicial process that lasted eight years, the Supreme Court of Justice of Peru acquitted Kuczynski, and other BCR officials, of all charges.

As such, he made numerous agreements with the International Monetary Fund to help fulfill the goals in the neoliberal economic policies outlined by Peru.

He returned to office on 16 February 2004, and was appointed as the Prime Minister of Peru on 16 August 2005, following the resignation of Carlos Ferrero Costa.

In 2015, he announced that he would run for president again, but with a political party that he had built himself (Peruvians for Change, Peruanos Por el Kambio, PPK).

Barely a week before the second round of voting, while trailing Keiko, Kuczynski received an important endorsement from third-place finisher Verónika Mendoza (18.82%), Peru's leading left-wing candidate, in an effort to defeat Fujimori.

This did not please the conservatives who had previously supported him, which led to the censure of two of his education ministers by the opposition-controlled congress, and a no-confidence vote for his entire cabinet in 2017.

[37] Peru revoked Venezuela's invitation to the 8th Summit of the Americas because of Maduro's plan to hold an early presidential election, as the major opposing parties were banned from it.

[38] On 15 December 2017, the Congress of the Republic initiated impeachment proceedings against Kuczynski, with the congressional opposition stating that he had lost the ″moral capacity″ to lead the country after he admitted receiving advisory fees from scandal-hit Brazilian construction company Odebrecht while he was Peru's Minister of Economy and Finance between 2004 and 2005.

The next day on 21 March 2018, a video was released of Kuczynski allies, including his lawyer and Kenji Fujimori, attempting to buy a vote against impeachment from one official.

The current Peruvian Constitution of 1993 establishes in its article 113 that the Presidency of the Republic is vacated by:[45] The Board of Spokesmen of the Congress agreed to accept the resignation.

[47][48] On 10 April 2019, he was arrested along with his secretary Gloria Kisic Wagner and his ex-driver José Luis Bernaola for an alleged crime of money laundering in the Odebrecht case.

For Gloria Kisic Wagner and José Luis Bernaola, the judge rejected preventive detention and ordered that both serve a restricted appearance.

[51][52] The leak allegedly showed that when Kuczynski was Minister of the Economy in July 2004, he created Dorado Asset Management LTD with the help of OMC Group in the British Virgin Islands.

[52] Kuczynski's attorney responded to the Pandora documents saying "Dorado was conceived exclusively as a legal mechanism for patrimonial protection; it was used only for two properties acquired with money of lawful origin".

[53] His father was an officer in the German Army on the Eastern and Turkish fronts in the First World War, and he traveled widely in Russia, China, West Africa, and Brazil.

Maxime Hans Kuczynski left Germany in 1933 due to persecution of his Jewish roots, and he was invited to Peru in 1936 by President Óscar R. Benavides to set up the public health service in the interior of the country.