João Leão Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

As Minister of Finance, Leão oversaw the government’s overhaul plan for ailing TAP Air Portugal amid the COVID-19 pandemic, proposing 2,000 job cuts by 2022, pay cuts of up to 25% and 2 billion euros ($2.46 billion) in extra funds with state guarantees to cover financing needs until 2024.

In 2022, Leão became Portugal’s nominee to succeed Klaus Regling as Managing Director of the European Stability Mechanism; his candidacy was later endorsed by the French government and later achieved the majority of the weighted votes in the July 2022 meeting of Board of Governors of the ESM. The nomination process narrowed to Leão and Pierre Gramegna, but both pulled out in September 2022 having failed to secure the votes required.

When Portugal held the rotating presidency of the European Council in the first semester of 2021, Leão chaired the meetings of the Economic and Financial Affairs Council (ECOFIN).

While Leão was at Ministry of Finance, Portugal achieved in 2019 the first budget surplus of the 45 years of the country’s democratic history. In 2021, after the peak of the pandemic, Portugal was also among the first group of Euro area countries to reach a budget deficit below the European limit of 3%. Portugal’s fiscal deficit fell from 5,8% in 2020 to 2.8% of GDP in 2021, significantly better than the government’s target of 4.3% of GDP, and lower than the average deficit in the eurozone. Meanwhile, the decline in Portugal’s debt ratio was the third largest in the eurozone. Debt-to-GDP fell 7.8pp in 2021, compared with an average decline of 1.6pp in the eurozone.

In Costa’s government, Leão previously served as Secretary of State for the Budget from 2015 until 2020.

João Rodrigo Reis Carvalho Leão (born 15 February 1974) is a Portuguese economist, university professor, and politician. He served as Minister of Finance in the government of Prime Minister António Costa of Portugal, sworn in on 15 June 2020.

Leão was born in Lisbon in 1974. He completed his BSc degree in economics in Nova School of Economics. Later, he went on to obtain a PhD in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2008. His PhD thesis advisor was Abhijit Banerjee, Nobel Prize in Economics.