Background
Vestager was born on April 13, 1968, in Glostrup, Zealand. She is a daughter of Lutheran ministers Hans Vestager and Bodil Tybjerg.
Vestager was born on April 13, 1968, in Glostrup, Zealand. She is a daughter of Lutheran ministers Hans Vestager and Bodil Tybjerg.
Margrethe matriculated from Varde Upper Secondary school in 1986. She studied at the University of Copenhagen, graduating in 1993 with a degree in Economics. Vestager speaks Danish, English and some French.
Vestager has been a professional politician since the age of 21, when she was appointed to the central board and executive committee of the SLP and its European Affairs Committee, and shortly afterwards as National Chairwoman of the Party. In 2001, Vestager was elected to the Danish Parliament, becoming Chairwoman of its Parliamentary Group in 2007. She was appointed Minister of Education and Ecclesiastical Affairs in 1998.
On June 15, 2007, Vestager secured election as her Party's parliamentary group leader in the Folketing, replacing Marianne Jelved. When Denmark's Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen called an early election in 2011 after failing to secure majority lawmaker backing for his economic stimulus package, Vestager's Social Liberals and the Conservative People's Party formed a political alliance, pledging to work together no matter which political bloc would win the election.
From 2011 until 2014 Vestager served as Minister for Economic and Interior Affairs in the three-party Social Democrat-led coalition government of Helle Thorning-Schmidt. Having forced through deep cuts in unemployment benefits of Denmark's generous social welfare system after the country's economy narrowly escaped recession in 2012, she was at one point considered by Danish media and pollsters as the most powerful person in government, even above Thorning-Schmidt.
In her time in office, chaired the meetings of economic and finance ministers of the European Union (ECOFIN) during Denmark's presidency of the Council of Ministers in 2012. In this capacity, she announced that the European Union would cede two of its seats on the board of the International Monetary Fund to emerging economies under a new power-sharing scheme for international financial institutions. She also worked closely with Jean-Claude Juncker to salvage Europe's financial sector and forge a European Banking Union.
Between 2011 and 2014, Vestager led Denmark's campaign against Basel III liquidity rules, arguing in favor of allowing banks to use 75 percent more in covered bonds to fill liquidity buffers than allowed under Basel III rules; at the time Denmark's $550 billion mortgage-backed covered bond market, part of the country's two-century-old mortgage system, was the world's largest per capita. In 2013 she ruled out slowing down steps toward stricter requirements for systemically important lenders and reiterated her stance that banks won’t get tax breaks to help them through the transition caused by regulatory reform.
In May 2014, Vestager presented a growth package designed to drag Denmark's economy – at the time Scandinavia's weakest – out of its crisis, raising the country's structural output by 6 billion kroner ($1.1 billion) and cut costs for companies by 4 billion kroner in 2020 through 89 measures to improve the business climate and boost employment.
On 31 August 2014, Prime Minister Thorning-Schmidt nominated Vestager as Denmark's EU Commissioner in the Juncker Commission. Despite her repeated denials of campaigning for the Environment portfolio, eventually she was designated the Competition dossier in the Juncker Commission. On 3 October 2014, she won the European Parliament's backing following her confirmation hearing.
In her confirmation hearings, Vestager said she favored settlement of cases before they come to a final executive judgment, for reduced fines or negotiated concessions from the companies.
Like her predecessor, Joaquín Almunia, Vestager has since been focusing on state aid cases. Within a few months in the office, she brought antitrust charges against Google; Almunia had initially opened the investigation into Google in 2010, and had reached a settlement deal with Google by 2014 but was unable to convince the European Commission to accept it before his term ended. Vestager inherited Almunia's case but has shown greater desire to continue pursuing Google/Alphabet over the alleged antitrust violations. Also, she initiated investigations into the tax affairs of Fiat, Starbucks, Amazon.com and Apple Inc. under competition rules. In 2014, she launched proceedings against Gazprom, one of Europe's main gas suppliers, over allegations of breaching EU antitrust rules by putting in place artificial barriers to trade with eight European countries: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria.
In January 2015, Vestager ordered Cyprus Airways to pay back over 65 million euros in illegal state aid received in 2012 and 2013 as part of a restructuring package; as a consequence, Cyprus suspended operations at its flag carrier resulting in 550 job losses and reduced competition.
In August 2016, after a two–year investigation, Vestager announced Apple Inc. received illegal tax benefits from Ireland. The Commission ordered Apple to pay a fine of €13 billion, plus interest, in unpaid Irish taxes for 2004–2014; the largest tax fine in history. As a result of the EU investigation, Apple agreed to re-structure out of its 2004–2014 Irish BEPS tool, the Double Irish in Q1 2015; Apple's replacement Irish BEPS tool, the CAIA arrangement caused Irish 2015 GDP to rise by 34.4 per cent, and was labelled Leprechaun economics by Nobel Prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman in July 2016.
In July 2017, a fine of $2.7 billion against Alphabet (formerly Google) was levied based on the European Commission claim that Google breached antitrust rules. This fine was later appealed.
In October 2017, Vestager ordered Amazon to pay €250 million of back taxes, and in January 2018, the EU Commission fined Qualcomm €997 million for allegedly abusing its market dominance on LTE baseband chipsets. In July 2018, she fined Alphabet (Google) €4.3 billion for entrenching its dominance in internet search by illegally tying together this service and other mobile apps with Android.
Margrethe Vestager has been described as "the most powerful woman in Brussels" - otherwise said, in European politics. As Commissioner for Competition for the European Union, Vestager is in charge of regulating commercial activity across the 28 member states and enforcing the EU's rules designed to keep the markets fair - rules that, she believes, some big companies have been abusing.
On February 15, 2017 Vestager received a doctorate honoris causa of the KU Leuven for her "firm policy on competition and government support within the European Union" and "specific attention to the ethical dimension of the behavior of companies and governments."
Margrethe was honored as one of TIME Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in 2017.
She shares her parents’ Christian faith, though she says she has had a “troublesome” relationship with the church. “If I had a motto, it would be ‘believe in God, fear the church’,” she says. “History shows the power-grab in every religion once it gets organised. And then it’s people making you do things that you don’t agree with and setting the rules. But it does mean something to me to believe that we are not alone – the human animal is quite a scary thing, left on its own. And I like that (faith) gives me something to strive for, because I think if we have something to strive for, the better side of us comes to the front.”
Margrethe Vestager is in charge of regulating commercial activity across the European Union and enforcing the EU’s rules designed to keep the markets fair.
Her politics are liberal in the classic meaning of the term: free speech, free assembly and free trade - but she argues that it can only happen if markets are free of undue influence and anti-competitive behaviors.
In 2013, Vestager held that “(in) our experience it’s impossible to pursue Danish interests without being close to the core of Europe. You don’t have influence or produce results if you’re standing on the sideline.”
Quotations:
"A woman who wants to go places needs to bring her own ladder."
"We have to take our democracy back. We cannot leave it to Facebook or Snapchat or anyone else. We have to take democracy back and renew it. Society is about people and not about technology."
"I have a very strong tool in competitional enforcement: To do merger control, to look into cartels, misuse of dominant position - when member states hand out favors, for instance, in terms of tax breaks. But even though that's a strong tool, it cannot solve everything."
"In Europe, we have three tools when it comes to fair competition. One is antitrust, one is merger control, and the third is state aid control. And the third you don't have in the States."
"Most politicians are either generalists or specialists. It's very rare that a politician is both."
"You have to teach your algorithm what it can do and what it cannot do because, otherwise, there is a risk that the algorithms will learn the tricks of the old cartels."
"If I had a motto, it would be, 'Believe in God, fear the church'."
"It is very important, to have a robust digital economy, that the citizens regain the trust in how their data are being processed and who can access them."
"I do not have an issue with specific countries or companies; what I'm interested in are schemes which allow for preferential treatment, for selectivity... If this has to change, it's countries that will have to change this."
"I think it is one of the fundamentals, not only of the European Union but also of free trade, that competition is fair."
"I think a lot can be said for consolidation, but I think it should be done for the right reasons."
"I was brought up with a very strong value that you should always protect the small and the few against those who want to misuse their muscle and weight in order to get what they weren't supposed to."
"If you, as a company, can get a deal that I, as a company, cannot get, you can compete with me but not on the merits, because your tax burden is not the same as mine."
"It's not in my mission to work against Euroskepticism; it's my mission to work for fair markets. In antitrust, what is at stake is, in some ways, as old as Adam and Eve because it is about greed, to get more."
Margrethe was a Member of the Board of Advisors at the Greenland (2004-2007), Member of the Executive Committeeat UNICEF Denmark (2007-2011), Member of the Trilateral Commission (2010-2011), Chairwoman of the Board of Blaagaards Seminarium (2006-2009), Member of the Board of the University College Copenhagen (2006-2009), Chairwoman of the Advisory Board of the Copenhagen Business School, Institute for Management, Politics, and Philosophy (2003-2008). She is a Member of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), Member of the Trilateral Commission and a Member of the European Group.
Physical Characteristics: Height - 5' 10½" (1,79 m)
Vestager's husband is a gymnasium maths-and-philosophy teacher. They have three daughters, Maria, Rebecca, and Ella. Her eldest daughter is preparing for medical university 2016 entry.
(married 1994)
(born 9 December 1954)
He is a Luxembourgish politician serving as President of the European Commission since 2014. From 1995 to 2013 he served as the 23rd Prime Minister of Luxembourg; from 1989 to 2009 he was also Minister for Finances.
(born 14 December 1966)
She is a retired Danish politician who served as the 26th Prime Minister of Denmark from 2011 to 2015, and Leader of the Social Democrats from 2005 to 2015.
