Irina Kummert

Irina Kummert studied German and English to become a teacher at the University of Bonn and the University of Passau. She later studied philosophy while working. Since 1997 Irina Kummert worked in the personnel consultancy for commercial enterprises.[1] Kummert received her Ph.D. in 2013 at the Goethe University in Frankfurt with a thesis on strategies of morality in the capital market. In the same year she became honorary president of the "Ethics Association of German Business" and has been involved in the Central Committee of German Catholics as a volunteer advisor in the field of economics and social affairs since 2014. In 2016, because of an invention of Julian Nida-Rümelin, she became a member of the Friends of the Munich Competence Center for Ethics at LMU Munich and a financial market-oriented ethics panel. Kümmert was teaching at various private and public universities.[2]

In 2018, Kummert became the founding president of a newly founded Rotary Club in Berlin (Rotary Clubs Berlin-Olympia). She published articles on economic policy in various media.[3]

The executive committee of DFB, led by interim president Rainer Koch elected Kummert as chairwoman of the DFB ethics committee in June 2021. Kummert had been a member of the committee since 2019. The commission members Bernd Knobloch and Nikolaus Schneider where also running for the position. In spring 2021, the commission was mainly busy with the re-evaluation of the struggle at the top of the DFB over the resigned President Fritz Keller and ex-General Secretary Friedrich Curtius. The women's initiative led by Katja Kraus has also called the ethics committee to evaluate an incident with co-interim president Rainer Koch.[4]

The Presidium voted 7 to 5 in favor of Irina Kummert. Thereupon the other members, besides the acting boss Knobloch, also Schneider and the corruption expert Birgit Galley, resigned immediately and raised serious allegations against the German Football Association. The committee was no longer able to act. According to the Süddeutscher Zeitung and the members of the ethics committee, the top of the association had apparently consciously accepted this fact.

In the case of Kummerts election, both Knobloch and Galley had announced their resignation days before the decision of the Presidium. In the aftermath, several high amateur representatives from the Presidium said they had been manipulated with false information about their competitors before Kummert's election. On the day before Kummert's election, Schneider's health was discussed and treasurer Stephan Osnabrügge claimed that Knobloch was being subject to ethical proceedings. Osnabrügge could not present any evidence for the proceedings. Later, however, Hans Eberhard Lorenz, head of the DFB sports court, stated that proceedings against Knobloch were pending with him, but could not give any details.[5]