Andrej Šircelj
Andrej Šircelj (born 28 February 1959) is a Slovenian politician who has been serving as Minister of Finance in the government of Prime Minister Janez Janša since 2020. Early life and education. Šircelj graduated from the Faculty of Economics in Ljubljana and completed his master’s degree at the Faculty of Law at the University of Maribor. Political career. In the 2011 elections Šircelj became a member of the National Assembly, where he chaired the Committee on Finance and Monetary Policy. He was re-elected as deputy to the National Assembly in the early 2014 elections. During his  two terms of office as deputy, he worked in the fields of finance and taxes, chaired the Commission for Public Finance Control and was a member of the Constitutional Commission and the Committee on Foreign Policy. In addition to his committee assignments, Šircelj was a member of the Slovenian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. In this capacity, he served – alongside Yuliya Lovochkina – as co-rapporteur for the monitoring of Armenia. Also during his time in parliament, Šircelj served as president of the board of Slovenia’s Bank Asset Management Company (BAMC), a bad bank which  bought up non-performing loans from the country’s largely state-owned banks in 2013 and 2014 to get them off their books. When Slovenia held the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2021, Šircelj chaired the meetings of the Economic and Financial Affairs Council.