Suma Chakrabarti | |
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6th President of European Bank for Reconstruction and Development | |
Assumed office 3 July 2012 |
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Preceded by | Thomas Mirow |
Personal details | |
Born | 1959 (age 57–58) Jalpaiguri, West Bengal, India |
Nationality | English |
Alma mater | University of Oxford |
Sir Suma Chakrabarti KCB (born 1959) was elected as the President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) on 18 May 2012 for a period of four years starting from 3 July 2012. He was elected for a second four year term on 11 May 2016.
Chakrabarti was born in 1959 in Jalpaiguri, West Bengal, India. He was educated at City of London School; New College, Oxford (BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics); and the University of Sussex (MA in Economics).
Chakrabarti joined the UK's Overseas Development Administration (ODA), the predecessor to the Department for International Development, in 1984 as a senior economic assistant working on macroeconomics issues and UK aid projects. He previously worked in Botswana on an Overseas Development Institute Fellowship. He was seconded by the UK government to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in the 1980s. On returning to the ODA in London, he became Private Secretary to the Conservative Lynda Chalker, then Minister of State for Overseas Development based at the Foreign Office. Chakrabarti subsequently became Head of Aid Policy and Resources.
He moved to H.M. Treasury in 1996 before taking a Cabinet Office post responsible for creating the new central Performance and Innovation Unit to support the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, coordinating reviews of long-term issues that cross public sector institutional boundaries. Still in the Cabinet Office, he headed the Economic and Domestic Affairs Secretariat, also maintaining a foot in the then Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions.