Margrethe Vestager

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Margrethe Vestager (2019)

Margrethe Vestager [ mɑˈg̊ʁeːɪ̯d̥ə ˈʋɛstʰeːɪ̯ɐ ] (born April 13, 1968 in Glostrup ) is a Danish politician of the left-liberal radical Venstre (RV) party. She has been the EU Commissioner for Competition since 2014 . Since December 1, 2019, she has also been Executive Vice President and Commissioner for Digital.

Life

Margrethe Vestager grew up in a parsonage as the eldest of four children of a pastor couple in West Jutland . Her great-great-grandfather was one of the founders of the Det Radikalische Venstre party , and her parents were also involved there. She studied at the University of Copenhagen until 1993 , where she obtained a Master of Science degree in economics. She then worked for the Danish Ministry of Finance from 1993 to 1995 and from 1995 to 1997 as a special advisor to the Danish State Finance Agency.

From 1993 to 1997 she was Marianne Jelved's successor as party chairman of the RV and was primarily responsible for the internal organization of the party. From March 23, 1998 to November 27, 2001 Vestager was Minister of Education, succeeding Ole Vig Jensen ; until December 21, 2000 she was also responsible for the church ministry. A public outcry broke out when it became known that the church minister had not baptized her eldest daughter, Maria. However, she and her husband maintained their position that their children should later decide for themselves whether to be baptized.

In 2007 Vestager took over the political leadership of the RV. She initially held the chairmanship of the parliamentary group until, after the successful election in 2011, she led the Ministry of Economics and the Interior in the Thorning-Schmidt I and Thorning-Schmidt II cabinets . In 2011 she was party chairman , economics minister , interior minister and deputy head of government . Among other things, it implemented tough social reforms that also included cuts in the salaries of the long-term unemployed . In 2017 she was awarded the Reinhold Maier Medal .

Vestager is married to Thomas Jensen and has three daughters.

EU Commissioner for Competition

Helle Thorning-Schmidt proposed Vestager as Danish EU Commissioner in the Juncker Commission in 2014 . Therefore, she retired from her political office in Denmark on September 2, 2014. On September 10, 2014, Jean-Claude Juncker officially nominated Vestager as EU Commissioner for Competition; the Directorate General for Competition is assigned to it; since November 2014 she has been the successor to Joaquín Almunia .

In connection with the creation of the EU's digital single market , Vestager rejects the proposal by the EU Commissioner for the Digital Economy, Günther Oettinger , to approve mergers of large telecommunications groups in Europe before a common digital market exists in the EU. The EU Commissioner is of the opinion that the lower competitive pressure would otherwise result in significantly higher costs for consumers.

Also in November 2014, the EU Competition Commissioner started investigations against several truck manufacturers in Europe because, in her opinion, there had been serious violations of antitrust law. Daimler, Volvo and MAN , among others, are affected by the investigations .

At the beginning of 2015, Vestager ensured that Cyprus Airways , the loss-making state-owned airline Cyprus Airways, had to repay € 65 million in state aid to Cyprus because the payment did not comply with EU state aid rules. The European Commissioner added that companies must create their competitiveness on their own and not rely on the state. Cyprus Airways then ceased operations. Cyprus Airways had been in deficit since 2007 and until then had not managed to become competitive on its own, although Cyprus had supported the airline with considerable financial resources in advance.

In April 2015, she led the European Commission to accuse Google of market abuse. According to Vestager, the US group abused its dominant position among the search engines in Europe to favor its price comparison service Google Shopping . For this reason, Google fined them € 2.42 billion in June 2017. Vestager also opened an investigation to investigate whether Google is abusing its position when using the Android mobile operating system , for example against manufacturers of tablets and smartphones. In July 2018, it decided in this context that Google would have to pay a new record fine of 4.3 billion euros to the EU Commission. TIME magazine called it "Google's Worst Nightmare".

In May 2015, in an interview, she criticized the Russian energy company Gazprom for abusing its market power in Eastern EU countries and making gas delivery in Poland and Bulgaria dependent on the use of its own pipelines, which led to considerable additional costs for the countries concerned .

In October 2015 she expressed her satisfaction with an agreement between the EU Commission and the owners of HSH Nordbank (the federal states of Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein ) either to find a buyer for the bank or to liquidate it.

At the end of January 2019, Vestager fined the US company Mastercard with a fine of 570 million euros. Mastercard is said to have charged excessively expensive fees for credit card withdrawals for years and thus violated European antitrust law.

Since taking office, Vestager has - as of May 2019 - imposed more than 15 billion euros in antitrust fines, almost twice as many as were imposed during her predecessor's tenure.

Proceedings against anti-competitive tax practices

As the EU's competition commissioner, Vestager campaigns against tax practices in certain member states. In tax rulings, they are said to have assured companies that their taxes would be technically determined in such a way that the result, at least within the EU and the EEA, was a lower tax liability than should have been incurred in the opinion of the European Commission. In the proceedings of the European Commission against the Member States, it regards these practices as unlawful aid within the meaning of Art. 107 TFEU. The European ban on state aid is intended to prevent distortions of competition in the internal market.

In November 2014 Vestager initiated investigations against Great Britain , Belgium , Malta and Cyprus , as the EU Commission feared illegal tax deals between the states and individual companies. The proceedings against Ireland , the Netherlands and Luxembourg continued, and Luxembourg had requested further information on the deals with Amazon and FCA. After Luxembourg refused to disclose further information, Vestager announced that it would, if necessary, take it to the European Court of Justice. The investigations also affect Apple in Ireland and Starbucks in the Netherlands.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said of the allegations: "We have no special agreement with the Irish government". Irish Treasury Secretary Michael Noonan promised to accept Vestager's ruling. On August 30, 2016, Margrethe Vestager declared on behalf of the EU Commission that the Irish government had violated the rules of the internal market by selectively granting a single company tax advantages over many years. The effective tax for Apple in Europe was 1% of profits in 2003 and even dropped to 0.005% (€ 50 tax per million € corporate profit) by 2014. Ireland now has to reclaim the lost taxes of 13 billion US dollars plus interest from Apple. The decision was annulled by the EU court in 2020 .

It has sued the two groups Fiat-Chrysler and Starbucks, which have received illegal tax advantages in Luxembourg and the Netherlands, respectively, for back taxes of 30 million euros .

In December 2015, another case was opened against the US group McDonald’s , as it is said not to have paid any taxes through the subsidiary McDonald’s Europe Franchising in Luxembourg, although a profit of 250 million euros was made in 2013 alone. Between 2009 and 2013, McDonalds - according to the union - evaded over 1 billion euros in taxes in the EU.

In January 2016, Vestager closed the case against Belgium. The Belgian government was obliged to reclaim a total of EUR 700 million in tax rebates from 35 companies. In Belgium, these companies were able to compare actual profits with an estimated average profit. The difference between the two values ​​could be deducted as so-called profit surplus , thus reducing corporation tax by 50–90%. British American Tobacco and Inbev are among the companies affected .

EU commissions

Web links

Commons : Margrethe Vestager  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ tagesschau.de: The new members of the European Commission. Retrieved November 28, 2019 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e Alexander Mühlauer: The decent one. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , January 25, 2016.
  3. ↑ Christoph Pauly and Michaela Schießl: A Viking in Brussels . In: Der Spiegel . No. 13 , 2015, p. 64-66 ( online ).
  4. ^ Commissioner Margrethe Vestager. In: europa.eu. Retrieved August 16, 2015 .
  5. ↑ Cyprus Airways ceases operations after the EU Commission judgment , accessed on October 29, 2019
  6. ↑ State aid: Commission orders the recovery of illegal aid from Cypriot airline Cyprus Airways. In: europa.eu. January 9, 2015, accessed August 16, 2015 .
  7. ↑ Florian Güßgen: Brussels declares war on the giant. In: Stern . April 16, 2015, accessed August 16, 2015 .
  8. ↑ Alexander Mühlauer / Vivien Timmler: EU imposes a € 4.3 billion fine on Google. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . July 18, 2018, accessed July 18, 2018 .
  9. ↑ Lisa Abend: Why this woman is Google's worst nightmare. In: Time , May 20, 2015 (English).
  10. ↑ Georgi Gotev, Sarantis Michalopoulos: Competition Commissioner Vestager: “Gazprom seals off the markets in Central and Eastern Europe”. In: EurActiv . May 22, 2015, accessed August 16, 2015 .
  11. ↑ HSH Nordbank is to be privatized. In: Handelsblatt , October 19, 2015.
  12. ↑ Carsten Germis : HSH Nordbank will be privatized by 2018. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , October 19, 2015.
  13. ↑ Mirko Wollrab: HSH Nordbank surrenders portfolios - guarantee fee drops significantly - countries agree on privatization. ( Memento from August 10, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) In: hsh-nordbank.de , October 19, 2015.
  14. ↑ Mastercard: 570 million fine for credit card rip-off. Retrieved January 22, 2019 .
  15. ↑ EU imposes a fine of 570 million euros on Mastercard. January 22, 2019, accessed January 22, 2019 .
  16. ↑ Harald Schumann : Legislation in the black box: How democratic is the EU? Sheets for German and International Politics , May 2019, accessed on May 25, 2019 .
  17. ↑ Art. 107 TFEU. Retrieved December 4, 2016 .
  18. ↑ State aid: Ireland granted Apple illegal tax breaks of up to EUR 13 billion. In: europa.eu. August 30, 2016, accessed August 30, 2016 .
  19. ↑ Christoph G. Schmutz: EU court cancels record tax back payment for Apple in Ireland. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, July 15, 2020.
  20. ↑ EU Commission targets McDonald's for tax tricks. In: finanzen.net , December 3, 2015.
personal data
SURNAME Vestager, Margrethe
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Danish politician (Det Radikalische Venstre (RV)), member of the Folketing
DATE OF BIRTH April 13, 1968
PLACE OF BIRTH Glostrup , Denmark