Tharman Shanmugaratnam
Tharman was appointed Deputy Prime Minister in the Singapore Cabinet following the General Elections in May 2011. He continues as Minister for Finance, a responsibility he has performed since Dec 2007, and now serves also as Minister for Manpower.
He was appointed Chairman of the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC), the policy steering committee of the IMF, in March 2011. He was also admitted to the Group of Thirty, also known as "The Consultative Group on International Economic and Monetary Affairs", in June 2008.
He spent much of his earlier professional life at the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), Singapore’s central bank and integrated financial regulator, where he was managing director before his entry into politics in 2001. He has served in economic and education appointments since then, including five years as Minister for Education. In May 2011, he was also appointed Chairman of MAS.
Tharman was appointed by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong in May 2009 to lead an Economic Strategies Committee (ESC), established to develop strategies for Singapore to build capabilities, maximize opportunities in a new global environment and enable the broad-based growth of citizen’s incomes over the next decade. The ESC, comprising public and private sector leaders, put forward its key recommendations in Feb 2010, which have been accepted by the Government.
He serves on the boards of the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC), the MAS and the National Research Foundation. He is in addition Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Singapore Indian Development Association (SINDA), which seeks to uplift educational aspirations and strengthen social resilience in the Indian Singaporean community; Chairman of the Ong Teng Cheong Institute of Labour Studies; and Chairman of the Council of Advisors of the Singapore Industrial and Services Employees Union (SISEU).
Tharman did his undergraduate and masters education in Economics at the London School of Economics and Cambridge University. He later obtained a masters in Public Administration at Harvard University, where he received the Lucius N Littauer Fellow award for outstanding performance and leadership potential. He became the fifth recipient of the Award of Honorary Fellow of the Economic Society of Singapore, in July 2010.
He is married to Jane Yumiko Ittogi, a lawyer by background and now actively engaged in community work and the non-profit arts sector. They have four children, three boys and a girl, in their mid to late teens.