Jutta Dönges is different from her predecessors. Her 13-year tenure at the investment bank Goldman Sachs shaped her. The graduate industrial engineer learned there from scratch how to structure acquisitions for corporate customers in international teams and finance them in the best possible way. After three more years in the management of the German subsidiary of the Swedish bank SEB, the 49-year-old Dönges brought her unusual capital market expertise to the state bank rescue fund Soffin from 2014, which she took over from the former Dresdner Bank boss Herbert Walter in 2016. In doing so, it has reduced losses for the taxpayer.
Since Soffin was integrated into the finance agency in 2018, Dönges has managed this 300-strong company of the Federal Ministry of Finance, which is responsible for federal debt management. Since 2020 she has also been responsible for the economic stabilization fund, with which the federal government is supporting companies in the Corona crisis, including Lufthansa and the tourism group TUI with equity. But now Dönges is breaking new ground. The finance agency told the FAZ on Monday that she had decided not to extend her contract as managing director and to leave on October 31.
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A new mandate on the top management committee of the Canadian company Rock Tech, which cooperates with Mercedes and intends to supply 10,000 tons of lithium hydroxide for vehicle batteries per year from 2026, serves as a bridge to the new stage in her career. Rock Tech does not offer her any fixed departmental responsibility. But she can also operate as a non-executive, as she liked to do in the finance agency. However, this happens rather in secret on the outskirts of Frankfurt.
Better known, however, are Dönges’ activities as a member of the federal supervisory board at Commerzbank and TUI. She exercised controlling functions in these bodies. There were several reports that the woman, who was still in the middle of her professional life, was not satisfied with the task of inspector of the board. Rather, she is striving to be on the board herself, which she was denied. However, it seems more plausible that Dönges was actually asked whether she wanted to become a board member for corporate customers at Commerzbank, and deliberately declined. When it comes to analyzing and calculating, nobody can fool her.
Jutta Donges
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Image: Frank Röth
Saving banks is not a business for the state, Dönges’ predecessors used to say when they took stock of the Soffin financial market stabilization fund created in 2008. After all, with the emergency nationalization of the real estate financier Hypo Real Estate, the partial nationalization of Commerzbank and the liquidation of West LB in the years of the financial crisis between 2008 and 2012, the main aim was to prevent the financial system from collapsing. Unfortunately, the heads of the state rescue fund Soffin rarely gave the impression that they were getting the very best out of it for the taxpayers. The two Landesbankers Günther Merl and Hannes Rehm and the former President of the Association of Volksbanks Christopher Pleister are hardly to be taken too seriously if you do not consider them to be particularly proven deal-maker experts.