Gerhard Gribkowsky

Gerhard Gribkowsky was born in Hamburg on 16 April 1958. His father sat on the board of the Beck's brewery. After a traineeship at Siemens from 1979 to 1981 he studied law at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat Freiburg and received a doctorate in 1988. He then joined Deutsche Bank, rising to regional management for Bavaria and overseeing risk positions in several industry sectors worldwide before leaving in 2002.

From 2003 until 2 April 2008 Gribkowsky was a member of the BayernLB board in Munich, responsible for risk. The publicly owned Landesbank had become a major Formula One shareholder after taking KirchMedia shares as loan collateral. From late 2003 Gribkowsky sat on Formula One company boards for the bank and pushed to find a buyer.

On 25 November 2005 Alpha Prema, backed by CVC Capital Partners and supported by Bernie Ecclestone, took BayernLB's Formula One stake for about 837 million dollars, and soon consolidated control. The same day Gribkowsky's GG Consulting was registered in Austria. In 2006-2007 that firm received roughly 44 million dollars under advisory contracts from offshore vehicles. He also sat on boards including Formula One Administration, Deutsche Kreditbank, Strabag and Zublin, and was a director at Hungary's MKB Bank.

Separately, BayernLB's purchase of Hypo Alpe Adria produced huge losses; Gribkowsky was removed from the board on 2 April 2008. Civil claims of hundreds of millions of euros against former board members followed; a related criminal case against him was later dropped in light of the Formula One sentence.

Gribkowsky lived in Grunwald near Munich until his arrest and had three adult children from a first marriage. After early release he continued work connected with Strabag, where he had already been employed during day release from prison. From March 2019 he served as an unpaid volunteer assistant (Messner) at the Protestant Christuskirche in Munich-Neuhausen.

On 4 October 2026 Gribkowsky was riding a motorcycle on Bundesstrasse 27 toward Reichenau in the Hollental near Schwarzau im Gebirge, Lower Austria, when he left the carriageway. The front wheel hit a roadside drain cover and he was thrown several metres. Witnesses called emergency services; he died at the scene. He was 68. Austrian reports first described an unnamed 68-year-old; Bild and other German outlets named him around 16 October. His former counsel told Bild that after prison he had found his way back into ordinary life and that the crash was deeply sad for him and his family. No separate medical cause beyond the crash injuries was published.

Gribkowsky's name remains tied to one of Formula One's largest corruption cases: a BayernLB risk chief who took tens of millions of dollars around the CVC sale and received a lengthy prison term. The episode damaged the state bank's reputation and featured in the wider Ecclestone-era ownership story. After release he kept a lower public profile, returning to construction-related work and church volunteering in Munich, until the motorcycle crash in Austria ended his life.