Olaf Levonen
Olaf Levonen (born 29 December 1966 in Alfeld (Leine)) is a German politician (SPD) and district gouverneur of Hildesheim, Lower Saxony. Career. Levonen has held various positions in the district administration of the district of Hildesheim since 1983. Since 2011, he had been the deputy district gouverneur. Levonen was elected district gouverneur of the Hildesheim district in 2016, succeeding Reiner Wegner (also SPD). He is also President of the Board of Trustees of the "Paul Feindt Foundation", Chairman of the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge County chapter Hildesheim and Vice-President of the Lions Club Hildesheim. From 1999 to 2006 , he was also managing director of the SPD parliamentary group in Hildesheim, as well as managing director of "Public Hospital Corporation Alfeld" from 2009 to 2016. Personal life and education. Olaf Levonen was born on 29 December 1966 in Alfeld (Leine), where he also spent his whole childhood and youth. He lives in Ummeln with his wife Sabine Levonen. Levonen completed undergraduate studies with a bachelor's degree in business administration "(Diplom-Kaufmann (FH))" at the "AKAD University of Applied Sciences" in Pinneberg. After further training for a Master of Public Administration (MPA) by distance learning, he earned a Master  of Commercial Law (LL.M. com.) in Business Law for Corporate Practice, a practice-oriented postgraduate degree programme for non-lawyers, at the "DISC – Distance and Independent Studies Center" in Kaiserslautern. Since 2020, Levonen publicly held a doctoral degree and declared that he had earned the internationally recognised degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Public Policy (PhD). In fact, it later turned out that this was not correct, as he was awarded the degree certificate by the internationally operating as diploma mill considered non-accredited Selinus University of Science and Literature Ltd, based in the Caribbean island nation of Dominica and  with operating office in Bologna, Italy. Levonen's thesis, which he described as a doctoral dissertation and which had only 84 pages, was entitled ""Human resource management in local government"" and already contained linguistic and conceptual errors in the title.