KLAUS REGLING comes to the banking inquiry with a reputation as a straight-talking heavyweight with vast professional experience in the complex world of economic administration.
He is best known for the years he spent as the top civil servant in the European Commission’s economic and monetary affairs unit, one of the most important departments in the EU bureaucracy.
In that role and in high-level posts he held in the German finance ministry, Mr Regling demonstrated a capacity to be blunt in the face of developments that were not to his liking.
It is a tendency that may serve him well when he delves into the labyrinthine forces behind the near-death of the Irish banking system, propped up to this day with billions of euro of scarce taxpayer funds.
“He’s a gruff German, totally devoid of a sense of humour. He’s a very serious guy,” said an official who was familiar with his work in Brussels.
Does he have the intellectual mettle and independence for the job? “He certainly wouldn’t be known as a duffer,” the official replied.
Mr Regling was director general of economic and financial affairs in the commission from 2001 until 2008. German chancellor Angela Merkel appointed him in 2008 to a commission that advised her on reforming financial regulation.
He was a senior official in the German finance ministry in the 1990s, helping to draft the EU’s fiscal rulebook and preparing for the euro. “Those with the old views are coming out like rats out of the wall,” he said when Paris and Rome hinted they wanted fiscal breathing space barely a month after the new currency came into being.
Mr Regling’s approach was direct in the commission. When the Italian government declared in 2001 that its budget deficit would be drastically higher than the commission’s estimates, a senior official in Rome was surprised to receive a call from Mr Regling the next morning asking whether Italy intended to fulfil its commitments.
Two years later, the commission’s tough stance over the widening of Germany’s deficit angered Berlin. The sense was that then chancellor Gerhard Schröder expected leniency from a branch of the commission run by a German. Wrong.
Mr Regling began his career in 1975 as an economist with the International Monetary Fund in Washington. Between 1999 and 2001, he was managing director of Moore Capital Strategy Group in London. He currently chairs KR Economics, a Brussels consultancy, and is a director of Winton Futures Fund, a hedge fund.
