Karl-Heinz Grasser does not boast the typical physique of an EU finance minister: not a hint of paunch that proclaims one too many Brussels lunches.

Instead, as a controversial photo spread discloses, he is so fit that he can take off his clothes, or at least his shirt, without embarrassment.

The recently retired Austrian minister is shown in the latest issue of the German Vanity Fair to be something of a hunk. But Mr Grasser, 38, fears that the pictures reveal too much, and his lawyers are drafting a complaint against the magazine, apparently concerned that he will no longer be taken seriously by his fellow financiers.

For seven years, until last autumn’s general election, Mr Grasser was regarded as the shooting star of the EU, cutting public spending — he was dubbed Mr Zero Deficit — and handing out advice on how to cut taxes to the visibly irritated finance ministers of France and Germany. After the election Mr Grasser was mentioned briefly as a possible deputy leader of Austria, but he chose to go into private business.

Now he appears bare-chested on newsstands, sprawled on a bed in a Ferragamo bathrobe and with gelled-back hair, next to his heiress wife, Fiona Swarovski. The Austrian media and financiers have been mocking. “It makes a bad impression,” Gundi Wentner, chief executive of the Austrian consultancy Deloitte Wentner-Havranek, said. “From my time at Chase Manhattan I know that bankers have a buttoned-up dress code.”

Vanity Fair is taking Mr Grasser’s complaints in its stride. “I see no reason to get excited about this,” Ulf Poschardt, the editor of the German edition, said.

Mr Grasser claims that the photographs were taken for Italian Vogue as part of a fashion shoot and the two most-revealing pictures were for private use. Vogue is a Condé Nast stablemate of Vanity Fair.

The former minister has always had a racier image than his colleagues in the treasuries of Europe. As a minister he proposed to an intern, the daughter of an Argentinian diplomat. During the engagement he conducted a secret affair with Ms Swarovski, whose family make crystal jewellery and ornaments. The affair came to light when a schoolboy spotted them kissing in Paris airport and took a picture on his mobile telephone.

Mr Grasser, once a protégé of the right-wing populist Jörg Haider, may be worried that the pictures could compromise not only a banking career but also a political comeback. He left Mr Haider’s Freedom Party after it became stridently antiimmigrant and was accepted as an independent politician into the Cabinet of Wolfgang Schös-sel, then the Chancellor.

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