PI/IEA Dinner with Hernando De Soto, President of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy
Tuesday 3rd November 6:30pm, Westminster

Pi Capital, through its special relationship with The Institute of Economic Affairs is delighted to be co hosting a drinks reception and dinner with guest speaker Hernando De Soto.  Hernando has served as an economist for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), as president of the Executive Committee of the Intergovernmental Council of Copper Exporting Countries (CIPEC), as managing director or CEO of Universal Engineering Corporation (Continental Europe’s largest consulting engineering firm), as a principal of the Swiss Bank Corporation Consultant Group, and as a governor of Peru’s Central Reserve Bank.   De Soto is currently President of the Lima-based ILD, where he works on the design and implementation of capital formation programmes in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and former Soviet Nations.  Some 30 heads of state have invited him to carry out these ILD programmes in their countries.  He also co-chairs with former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor. 

Praise for de Soto’s Work

Time magazine chose de Soto as one of the five leading Latin American innovators of the century in its special May 1999 issue Leaders of the New Millennium, and included him among the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004. De Soto was also listed as one of the 15 innovators "who will reinvent your future" according to Forbes magazine’s 85th anniversary edition. In January 2000, Entwicklung und Zusammenarbeit, the German development magazine, described de Soto as one of the most important development theoreticians of the last millennium. In October 2005, over 20,000 readers of Prospect magazine of the UK and Foreign Policy magazine of the U.S. ranked him among the top 13 "public intellectuals" in the world from the magazines’ joint list of 100.

De Soto has been praised by U.S. presidents from both major parties, with Bill Clinton calling him "The world’s greatest living economist", George H. W. Bush saying that "De Soto’s prescription offers a clear and promising alternative to economic stagnation and Ronald Reagan saying "De Soto and his colleagues have examined the only ladder for upward mobility. The free market is the other path to development and the one true path. It is the people’s path… it leads somewhere. It works. He has also received praise from United Nations Secretaries-General Kofi Annan—"Hernando de Soto is absolutely right, that we need to rethink how we capture economic growth and development"—and Javier Pérez de Cuéllar—"A crucial contribution. A new proposal for change that is valid for the whole world De Soto is also mentioned prominently in The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan.

If you would like to attend please RSVP to Kate Lewis

kl@picapital.co.uk

 020 7529 5664