Mehmet Şimşek, born on January 1, 1967 in Batman, is a Turkish economist and politician of Kurdish origin. After his duty between 2009-2015, he was appointed again in 2023 as the 67th Turkish Government Minister of Treasury and Finance.
Mehmet Simsek Life
Mehmet Şimşek was born on January 1, 1967 in Arıca (Kefre), a small village in Gercüş district of Batman (then Mardin), as the youngest child of a Kurdish family with eight children and subsistence agriculture. His father’s name is Hasan and his mother’s name is Mehdiye. His parents do not speak Turkish and he has four older brothers and four older sisters. His mother passed away when he was 5 years old.
His older sisters could not receive education due to the conditions of the period. Şimşek attended the first two years of primary school in his village. Since her older brother Nazmi is a teacher, she finished the rest of her primary school education in Batman, where she taught, and learned to speak Turkish in primary school. He completed his secondary and high school education in Gercüş.
Then he went to Ankara to get his university education and graduated from Ankara University, Faculty of Political Sciences, Department of Economics in 1988 as the second in the term.
He worked as a research assistant at the same faculty for about a year. He went to England, which is connected to the United Kingdom, for his master’s education with an Etibank scholarship.
He completed his master’s degree at the University of Exeter. His father died while he was in England. After qualifying for a master’s degree in finance and economics, he returned to Turkey.
Şimşek worked at Etibank for three months when he returned to Turkey. While he was working in Turkey, where he came for compulsory service in 1993, while looking at job advertisements in Hürriyet newspaper, when he saw the advertisement that the United States embassy was looking for an economist, he took the exam and was recruited.
He worked for 4 years as a senior economist in the US embassy in a department where some analyzes were made on the Turkish economy. He had allocated almost all of his salary to pay the Etibank debt installments for five years as a compulsory service.
After nearly 4 periods here, he got a residence permit in the USA in 1997 and moved to New York. He started working in the stock analysis unit of Union Bank of Switzerland, returning to Istanbul shortly after, in early 1998, where he started working in the securities division of Deutsche Bank.
He then assumed responsibility for the Mediterranean region at Merrill Lynch. A short time later, Central Europe and Russia were also included in his analysis, and during his tenure he met with a large number of officials at the level of prime minister and president of the countries in the region.
Not long after, at the end of 2005 he was appointed head of Merril Lynch’s division of economic and strategic studies for the emerging Europe, Middle East and Africa region.
He was nominated to head the Central Bank, but his appointment was not approved by the president of the time.
Mehmet Simsek; He took part in governments established under the premiership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Ahmet Davutoğlu and Binali Yıldırım. In 2007, 2011, June 2015 and November 2015 Turkish general elections, he entered the parliament as a member of the Justice and Development Party.
Şimşek took part as the Minister of State responsible for the economy in the 60th Government of Turkey established by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was the prime minister at that time. He also took part in the 61st Turkish Government established by Erdoğan and the 62nd Turkish Government established by Ahmet Davutoğlu, the 63rd Turkish Government and the 64th Turkish Government. It has been discussed for a long time that Şimşek will not be mentioned in the new cabinet.
He was appointed as the Deputy Prime Minister again in the 65th Government of Turkey established by Binali Yıldırım. In the new government, the chairmanship of the Economic Coordination Board was taken from Şimşek and given to Binali Yıldırım.
He was named Europe’s finance minister of the year in 2013 by Emerging Markets magazine. In the same year, he was named one of the 500 most influential people in the world by Foreign Policy magazine.
Şimşek entered the parliament for the first time as the AK Party Gaziantep deputy in the 2007 Turkish general elections and took place as the state minister responsible for the economy in the government established by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
In addition to his duty as the minister of state responsible for the economy, he has also been a member of the High Planning Council, the Privatization High Council, the Defense Industry High Coordination Board, the Economy Coordination Board, the Money-Credit and Coordination Board, and the Science and Technology High Council.
Şimşek, who carried out this duty until May 1, 2009, was appointed as the minister of finance with the cabinet reshuffle announced on that date. Şimşek, who was elected as the AK Party Batman deputy in the June 2011 elections, was reinstated as the finance minister.
He re-entered the parliament as the AK Party Gaziantep deputy in the June 2015 elections.
