Text size
Joerg Kukies, Germany’s new finance minister, is a former investment banker who has been one of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s closest advisers, most recently as state secretary.
The German leader brought Kukies into power circles in Berlin in 2018, when Scholz was finance minister under the leadership of Angela Merkel – causing confusion among the Social Democratic Party (SPD).
At the time, Kukies was working as a bank manager for Goldman Sachs in Germany.
The business daily Handelsblatt described his dramatic transition from banking to politics as “a real disaster”.
But despite the severe cuts, he stayed on — and three years later, when Scholz became chancellor, he moved into the chancellery’s financial adviser.
The 56-year-old has been a member of the SPD since the age of 18 and briefly served as head of the party’s branch in Rhineland-Palatinate in the early 1990s.
He left this position when he moved to Paris to study economics, then completed a master’s degree at Harvard University and a doctorate in Chicago.
In 2001 Kukies worked at Goldman Sachs in London, before moving to Frankfurt to work as an economist at the bank.
In 2014 he became CEO of Goldman Sachs AG and general manager of the Frankfurt branch, overseeing the bank’s business in Germany and Austria.
Cookies were mainly responsible for securities trading and “financial solutions”, he told the Wirtschaftswoche magazine at the time.
During the Covid pandemic, Kukies was the head of the Economic Stabilization Fund, which provided government guarantees on loans and repayment methods to help companies operate during the crisis.
He also acted as chief negotiator during the German airline Lufthansa’s temporary nationalization.
However, his reputation was tarnished in the Wirecard case, Germany’s most notorious accounting fraud case.
After Wirecard collapsed in 2020, it appeared that the company’s disgraced CEO Markus Braun had a meeting with Kukies at the Ministry of Finance in November 2019 – which led to his resignation.
The broader case led to the restructuring of Germany’s financial watchdog BaFin, widely criticized for ignoring early warnings about Wirecard.
As well as being a consultant, Kukies also represented Scholz at the G20 and G7 meetings.
His promotion to the ministerial post comes after Scholz sacked finance minister Christian Lindner, leading to the collapse of his three-party coalition.
With Lindner’s FDP out of government, Scholz hopes to remain in office until next year as leader of a minority coalition with the SPD and the Greens.
As the finance minister, Kukies will find his place to manage effectively in the absence of many people, according to experts.
The minority government is unable to pass the 2025 budget, which was the subject of months of bitter negotiations before the deal collapsed.
This won’t cause the government to shut down, however, and is a constant waste of money.
Less controversial measures and more urgent spending decisions, such as boosting aid to Ukraine, can also be approved with the support of opposition parties.
Left-wing German politician Sahra Wagenknecht was the first to oppose Kukies’ nomination on Thursday.
The fact that the Social Democrats, of all parties, gave a former Goldman Sachs banker the job of preparing the federal budget said “a lot about the SPD,” he said.
ilo-fec/sr/fz/sbk