André, Baron Vlerick (1919–1990) was a Belgian politician, businessman, professor and founder of the

Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School Vlerick Business School ("Vlerick") is a Belgian business school with campuses in Ghent, Leuven and Brussels. It is a result of a merger of the MBA programmes of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and of the ''Instituut Professor Vlerick voor Ma ...

. He graduated in economy at the

University of Ghent Ghent University ( nl, Universiteit Gent, abbreviated as UGent) is a public research university located in Ghent, Belgium. Established before the state of Belgium itself, the university was founded by the Dutch King William I in 1817, when th ...

and was appointed at the University of Leuven as well as the University of Ghent as Professor of Economics. He founded the department of regional economy at the University of Ghent. He is also the founder of Protea, a pro-

apartheid Apartheid (, especially South African English: , ; , "aparthood") was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s. Apartheid was ...

Belgian organisation which assisted the South African apartheid government in money laundering and circumventing sanctions through KredietBank. Vlerick's lobbying efforts extended to a pan-European formation called Eurosa. In addition to Protea in Belgium, there were “sister organisations” in Austria, Britain, Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and West Germany. Evidence collected from Vlerick's archive has established that Eurosa received direct funding from the apartheid government. A member of the Christian People's Party he was appointed during various Belgian Governments in the 1960s-1970s as Minister of the Flemish Regional Economy, actually till his appointment as

Minister of Finance A finance minister is an executive or cabinet position in charge of one or more of government finances, economic policy and financial regulation. A finance minister's portfolio has a large variety of names around the world, such as "treasury", " ...

in 1972. He was also appointed after the war as the Administrator of the Marshall Plan for Belgium. He was instrumental in the after-War years of the successful Flemish economic development. André Vlerick was a son-in-law of Gustave Sap and the uncle of Philippe Vlerick.

Publications

* ''U.S. Foreign business operations seen by a European Stanford Business Conference, Stanford University (U.S.A.) 1960.

Sources

* Aloïs Van De Voorde, ''André Vlerick : een minister-manager - een politieke biografie'', Lannoo, Tielt, 1996.

External links

André Vlerick
i
ODIS - Online Database for Intermediary Structures

Archives of André Vlerick
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ODIS - Online Database for Intermediary Structures

References

1919 births 1990 deaths Barons of Belgium Belgian economists Christian Democratic and Flemish politicians Finance ministers of Belgium Flemish businesspeople Flemish nobility Flemish politicians Ghent University alumni Ghent University faculty KU Leuven faculty People from Kortrijk {{Flanders-politician-stub