Shaukat Aziz

Shaukat Aziz (born 6 March 1949) is a Pakistani banker and politician who served as the 15th prime minister of Pakistan from 28 August 2004 to 15 November 2007 and as finance minister from 1999 to 2007. A career Citibank executive who rose to president of Citi Private Bank in New York, he was brought into government by President Pervez Musharraf, drove an aggressive programme of privatisation, deregulation and economic liberalisation, and left Pakistan for London when his term ended. ^{1 2}

He was born in Karachi on 6 March 1949, the son of a chief engineer of the state-owned Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation. He studied at Saint Patrick's School in Karachi and Abbottabad Public School, took a bachelor's degree in economics from Gordon College, Rawalpindi, in 1967, and obtained an MBA from the Institute of Business Administration in Karachi in 1969. ^{1 3}

He joined Citibank Pakistan as a credit officer in 1969 and served the bank in Pakistan, Greece, the United States, the United Kingdom, Malaysia, the Philippines, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Singapore, rising to executive vice-president of Citibank and president of Citi Private Bank in New York, with board seats at Citibank subsidiaries including Saudi American Bank and Citicorp Islamic Bank. In the 1990s he worked with the governments of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif on economic relief packages and played a central part in bringing multinational banking into Pakistan. ¹

Returning to Pakistan at Musharraf's personal request in November 1999, he took charge of the finance ministry and held it until November 2007. He activated the privatisation programme, pursued foreign investment and budgetary reform, and worked closely with the United States Treasury after the attacks of 11 September 2001 on debt relief and the financing of the war in Afghanistan. Pakistan's fiscal performance under his stewardship was praised by the IMF and the World Bank, while his deregulation policies also drew criticism at home. ¹

On 30 July 2004, while campaigning for a National Assembly seat, he survived a suicide bombing at Fateh Jang in Attock District that killed his chauffeur and six others; he called the incident tragic and said it had reinforced his resolve to serve Pakistan and the Islamic world. He won his seat and, after Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali's resignation, was nominated to succeed him. ^{1 2}

He took office on 28 August 2004, with Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain holding the post in the interim, and served until 15 November 2007. His government accelerated privatisation and liberalisation — by the end of his term all state-owned corporations slated for sale had been privatised, and GDP growth stood between 6.6 and 9 per cent — oversaw the local-government system, approved new nuclear power plants at Chashma and Karachi and the Diamer-Bhasha Dam, and developed the JF-17 fighter programme with China. Political economists cited in the article argue both that his reforms mastered the economy and that their indicators were unsustainable and offered little relief to the poor. When his term ended he immediately left Pakistan and settled in the United Kingdom, where he has served on company and advisory boards including Millennium & Copthorne Hotels and the Blackstone Group. ¹

Two later reports are recorded as the article states them, with his responses, not as settled findings. In 2011 he wrote from Dubai to the Balochistan High Court about a 2009 first information report in the Akbar Bugti case in which he had been mentioned, stating that he had learned of Bugti's death in a military operation from televised media. In November 2017 the Paradise Papers leaks reported that he was linked with the Antarctic Trust, a trust he had set up himself and had not declared while prime minister or finance minister; he told the ICIJ he had set the trust up for estate planning and that the funds came from his Citibank employment, and he dismissed allegations of financial impropriety. ¹

Wikidata gives his religion as Sunni Islam, but that is a single structured value. Neither article names a religion or school for him: the English article has no religion field and no text attesting an affiliation, and the Arabic article's infobox likewise has no religion field. His faith is therefore recorded as unclassified. ^{3 1 2}

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