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>If you're on the DAX or a politician, you're untouchable in Germany and lots of people inside and outside of Germany have no idea of how insanely corrupt the G

by chki 6y ago

>If you're on the DAX or a politician, you're untouchable in Germany and lots of people inside and outside of Germany have no idea of how insanely corrupt the German government and their corporate buddies are. This is obviously not true. There have been numerous uncovered political scandals in Germany that have led to politicians and managers loosing their job. Christian Wulff (Former German President), Guttenberg (former Defence Minister), etc.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ChuckNorris89 6y ago
Yes, but did they got to jail or have their earnings confiscated? Losing your job is not much of a deterrent when you've filled your pockets with bribes you get to keep and have a nice pension waiting for you while being put on the payroll as an external consultant to the $BIG_CORP you helped during your rule.
- qayxc 6y ago
  In order for any of that to happen you'd have to be convicted of a crime first. This would involve stripping immunity first, which doesn't happen all that often and involves approval from the parliament. Naturally, this is a partisan issue and members of the ruling parties would obviously vote against it, making it very difficult to achieve in practise. This is common practise in most democratic countries, though and isn't unique to Germany at all.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    But that still means that the OP was mostly right: these people are untouchable, so they can steal with impunity.
    - qayxc 6y ago
      It doesn't mean that these politicians are untouchable. If a politician is being caught stealing (e.g. embezzlement), criminal charges W I L L be put forward and immunity will be stripped from them. The problem here is that unethical behaviour and gross incompetence simply aren't criminal offences. Are they to be tolerated? No! But that's a question of changing laws and legislation accordingly, not one of being "untouchable" - because even politicians aren't and that's the point. There's a difference between conflict of interests/unethical behaviour/incompetence and criminal actions. The consequence of scandals like this should be a call for tighter laws, increased responsibility of all involved parties and better financial supervision in both politics and private enterprise. Simply getting out the pitchforks, shouting that all politicians are corrupt criminals and demanding heads to roll doesn't change anything and isn't constructive.
      - tsimionescu 6y ago
        Corruption is different from gross incompetence and unethical behavior.
        qayxc 6y ago
        You're still missing the point completely - corruption is a crime. The problem is that pretty much nothing these politicians do is actually illegal and thus doesn't constitute a crime in the first place. This is why legislation and regulations need to change, because that's way easier than trying to change people. If you don't like the rules of the game, demand to change the rules instead of shouting "You're all cheaters!" and stop there. That's just cheap and not helpful at all.
        creato 6y ago
        I generally agree with your point, but I disagree that legislation and regulations are the problem. Once you reach high level politics, the fact is that anything but utterly blatant criminal behavior will be a political issue. The solution is that politicians need to be held to a much higher standard than the letter of the law, by their voters. It boggles my mind how many politicians have such obvious conflicts of interest that manage to retain approval of their constituents.
donjoe 6y ago
It seems like a couple of years ago, once you fucked up, you resigned out of respect to your office/job/position. Looking at our current Minister of Transport 'Andi Scheuer', this does not seem to be the case any more. He is still in office after burning more than € 500M in the recent toll scandal [0]. [0]: https://www.dw.com/en/german-transport-minister-blasted-over-autobahn-toll-debacle/a-51773179 https://www.dw.com/en/german-transport-minister-blasted-over...
- peroporque 6y ago
  Or even worse, von der Leyen got promoted to be head of the EU. I mean, wtf!
  - dathinab 6y ago
    This really pissed me off. I mean she had been shown to be both bad at her job and corrupt and instead of kicking here out they promoted her away.
  - freeflight 6y ago
    That's been a rather old joke among Germans: Politicians we don't like we just promote to the EU parliament to get rid of them.
    - allendoerfer 6y ago
      There are no people west of Paris after all!
    - marton78 6y ago
      Hast du einen Opa, schick ihn nach Europa!
DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
Guttenberg had to resign because his doctoral thesis was full of plagiarism. Even the introduction was plagiarized - but with small changes that made it clear that an attempt had been made to hide the plagiarism. Guttenberg's public image rested on the idea that he was a morally upright, well composed, competent businessman, along with his noble lineage and family castle. The revelations about his thesis destroyed his credibility. This is rather different from financial corruption of the sort hinted at in this article.
- levosmetalo 6y ago
  At least he resigned when he was caught. Francisca Giffey, the Family Minister, never resigned when her doctor thesis was found plagiarized. Also von der Leyen, former German Defense Minister and current European Commission leader didn't resign when she was found that she falsified her official CV.
  - DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
    Guttenberg tried to hold onto his position. He at first rejected the accusations, even though they had already been extremely well documented: > Ich bin gerne bereit zu prüfen, ob bei über 1200 Fußnoten und 475 Seiten vereinzelt Fußnoten nicht oder nicht korrekt gesetzt sein sollten und würde dies bei einer Neuauflage berücksichtigen > I am perfectly willing to check whether in any of the over 1200 footnotes and 475 pages individual footnotes were not - or not correctly - inserted, and to correct this in a new edition. Guttenberg kept to this position for a week, while Angela Merkel and most of the government supported him. In the end, though, the extensive plagiarism (93% of the pages have at least one known instance of plagiarism) in his dissertation was so well documented that it was impossible to deny, and his statements about possibly having made a few mistakes here and there also looked more and more like outright lies. Nobody plagiarizes to that extent by mistake.
    - C1sc0cat 6y ago
      " or a contract to friend's friend's construction company" Is absolutely corruption. Years ago I did a high level IR/HR course at BT where this sort of low level corruption was one of the most common types of serious misconduct. Of course getting investigated by BT Security is not a happy fun experience.
bluelu 6y ago
Funny thing about Gutenberg is that he was also lobbying the german government in favor of Wirecard. https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/karl-theodor-zu-guttenberg-opposition-will-aufklaerung-ueber-lobbyarbeit-fuer-wirecard-bei-der-bundesregierung-a-a777e389-8388-4edc-b75f-22ff22906962 https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/karl-theodor-zu-g...
- mschuster91 6y ago
  Not just that, Guttenberg was also a key figure in the "Augustus Intelligence" corruption scandal of Philipp Amthor.
  - hef19898 6y ago
    Both, he is quite your guy for that. Kind of the lobbying equivalent of SoftBank, as soon as he's involved, probability of things being fishy increased significantly.
arcturus17 6y ago
Being Spanish yet having lived in Germany for quite some time, I agree with you... I'm not saying there's no corruption in Germany - I think there's always going to be some level corruption at a certain scale of state - but there's no need to go as far as China or Russia for comparison. Just come to the South of Europe for a taste of what grand-scale corruption in what are otherwise (seemingly) high-functioning democracies... I remember watching a Brazilian high government official (Justice minister?) on Anderson Cooper mentioning that Lava Jato had seen ~3 USD billion disappear, as Cooper reacted with a wide-eyed grin... And I thought to myself, huh, that's arguably the largest national corruption scandal in Brazil in recent history, and it's about the same size as the "EREs case" [1] in Spain, which was a regional affair, and where ~3 EUR billion also disappeared. One of many perpetrated by both main political parties in the last couple of decades. Like I say, I don't think Germany is without corruption, but it's a matter of gradation - it's hard to label it as an "insanely corrupt" country seeing what's out here. [1] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caso_ERE_en_Andaluc%C3%ADa https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caso_ERE_en_Andaluc%C3%ADa
- levosmetalo 6y ago
  The issue is people are just not aware on the corruption in Germany because there's no "personal" and "everyday" corruption in a daily life. But if you look "up" the amount of corruption rise to the astonishing levels. Just remember Stuttgart 21 or the Berlin Airport, Hamburg Elb Philharmonic, Battleship Gorch Fock. Germany is full of such corrupt projects, it's obvious and everyone knows about it, but nobody yet went to jail because of it.
  - awakeasleep 6y ago
    This resonates with me as an american. I dont think there is any amount of money i could offer to safely escape a drunk driving ticket, however the ceo of my company was the head of the board for an security company, and we were forced to use their products despite an unimaginable amount of flaws. The second the security company was sold we were allowed to drop every aspect of that company, 10 huge enterprise products, and the entire IT and Security organizations both agreed that throwing out the whole years roadmap and working to switch vendors as soon as possible was the best use of our time. Thats a small example of pure and utter -yet legal- corruption. There is no world in which that vendor was the right choice for a single product let alone 10. Except the world where the CEO could make the productivity of one company fungible with the revenue of another.
theelous3 6y ago
Losing your job just doesn't even register as an actual consequence when it comes to high level corruption though. Like maybe we should take their lollipops too? No TV before dinner?
levosmetalo 6y ago
Even though losing the job is not a punishment, not everyone even lost his job. Andreas Sheuer is still in charge of transport as a federal Minister, despite the 500,000,000 € heavy corruption scandal. Von der Leyen got even "promoted" to EU-lead position after heavy corruption scandal last year when she was a Defense Minister of Germany. Not only Germany, but in the whole EU commission leadership it would be hard to find someone without corruption scandal, accusation or conviction.
- allendoerfer 6y ago
  Scheuer is my personal pet peeve. His last act was to create road traffic regulations, except he made some procedural errors, so 16 states have to roll them back and implement them again once it has been properly voted on the law. All that after evaporating 500.000.000 € in a pissing contest everyone knew he was going to lose. The guy is corrupt and comically incompetent, but he just seems invincible. Why is he still in office? My theory is, that it has something to do with his dialect and his overall slightly idiotic appeareance. Though not on the same level as Trump or Boris Johnson, still that seems to give him some sort of protection, because people do not expect anything from him in the first place. But then again, like OP correctly said: Europes leader has a corruption scandal at home, deleted evidence, the whole thing, but just keeps doing her thing.
  - Grollicus 6y ago
    > Why is he still in office The answer to that question is called the CSU. But they are losing ground in Bavaria so there's hope.
    - allendoerfer 6y ago
      They will also provide the next chancellor of Germany, so I am not that hopeful yet.
      - pantalaimon 6y ago
        Söder?
rasz 6y ago
You are technically not wrong. I mean Hans-Georg Maassen, head of BfV (spy agency), did lose his job. Not after sharing secret information with neo nazis, that wasnt enough. He doubled down by calling fake news at a video showing neo nazis chasing/beating immigrants. Had to leave his BfV presidency ... for a higher paying position at the interior ministry ;-) aka promotion.
- s9w 6y ago
  That is not what happened at all.
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
    That's true and you are getting downvoted incorrectly. At first the interior minister wanted to move him to another equally well-paid position, but due to political backlash and also Maasen insisting there is a "radical left cabal" against him inside the government was retired early, which is still very much a golden parachute, but also the intended way for the government to remove political officials from office.
    - rasz 6y ago
      Retired to join law firm he was fighting while heading BfV. Clearly no conflict of interest there. https://www.dw.com/en/german-ex-spy-chief-maassen-to-join-law-firm-that-represented-afd/a-50650274 https://www.dw.com/en/german-ex-spy-chief-maassen-to-join-la... I hope the revolving door didnt hit him in the ass.
  - konradha 6y ago
    How so?
    - s9w 6y ago
      politics is verboten here
freeflight 6y ago
> Christian Wulff (Former German President), Guttenberg (former Defence Minister) None of these two served any prison sentences. Wulff was acquitted after he refused to pay 20k € to make it instantly go away and even had damages paid. Guttenberg was caught plagiarizing for his doctoral dissertation, which is a rather common thing among German politicans. As a consequence he lost some public clout, but instead wrote a book for even more publicity, afaik right now he's doing some work for Springer in the US, biding his time for a another comeback in German politics. Meanwhile to this day even Kohl's donation scandal, hasn't seen any proper investigation, nor the Amigo-scandal, NSU-scandal, nor the countless others, particularly on a local state level. Heck, just look at people like Mehdorn and projects like the BER construction site: He, being such a highly renowned and well paid manager, was supposed to fix that mess. Nothing was fixed, the whole thing is still a massive mess, political consequences for anybody actually responsible? Pretty much zero. The thing is: We Germans are very good about keeping up appearances, as a result of that inconvenient truths and topics often fall by the wayside.

by chki 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ChuckNorris89 6y ago

Yes, but did they got to jail or have their earnings confiscated? Losing your job is not much of a deterrent when you've filled your pockets with bribes you get to keep and have a nice pension waiting for you while being put on the payroll as an external consultant to the $BIG_CORP you helped during your rule.

qayxc 6y ago
In order for any of that to happen you'd have to be convicted of a crime first. This would involve stripping immunity first, which doesn't happen all that often and involves approval from the parliament. Naturally, this is a partisan issue and members of the ruling parties would obviously vote against it, making it very difficult to achieve in practise. This is common practise in most democratic countries, though and isn't unique to Germany at all.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  But that still means that the OP was mostly right: these people are untouchable, so they can steal with impunity.
  - qayxc 6y ago
    It doesn't mean that these politicians are untouchable. If a politician is being caught stealing (e.g. embezzlement), criminal charges W I L L be put forward and immunity will be stripped from them. The problem here is that unethical behaviour and gross incompetence simply aren't criminal offences. Are they to be tolerated? No! But that's a question of changing laws and legislation accordingly, not one of being "untouchable" - because even politicians aren't and that's the point. There's a difference between conflict of interests/unethical behaviour/incompetence and criminal actions. The consequence of scandals like this should be a call for tighter laws, increased responsibility of all involved parties and better financial supervision in both politics and private enterprise. Simply getting out the pitchforks, shouting that all politicians are corrupt criminals and demanding heads to roll doesn't change anything and isn't constructive.
    - tsimionescu 6y ago
      Corruption is different from gross incompetence and unethical behavior.
      - qayxc 6y ago
        You're still missing the point completely - corruption is a crime. The problem is that pretty much nothing these politicians do is actually illegal and thus doesn't constitute a crime in the first place. This is why legislation and regulations need to change, because that's way easier than trying to change people. If you don't like the rules of the game, demand to change the rules instead of shouting "You're all cheaters!" and stop there. That's just cheap and not helpful at all.
        creato 6y ago
        I generally agree with your point, but I disagree that legislation and regulations are the problem. Once you reach high level politics, the fact is that anything but utterly blatant criminal behavior will be a political issue. The solution is that politicians need to be held to a much higher standard than the letter of the law, by their voters. It boggles my mind how many politicians have such obvious conflicts of interest that manage to retain approval of their constituents.

donjoe 6y ago

It seems like a couple of years ago, once you fucked up, you resigned out of respect to your office/job/position. Looking at our current Minister of Transport 'Andi Scheuer', this does not seem to be the case any more. He is still in office after burning more than € 500M in the recent toll scandal [0]. [0]: https://www.dw.com/en/german-transport-minister-blasted-over-autobahn-toll-debacle/a-51773179 https://www.dw.com/en/german-transport-minister-blasted-over...

peroporque 6y ago
Or even worse, von der Leyen got promoted to be head of the EU. I mean, wtf!
- dathinab 6y ago
  This really pissed me off. I mean she had been shown to be both bad at her job and corrupt and instead of kicking here out they promoted her away.
- freeflight 6y ago
  That's been a rather old joke among Germans: Politicians we don't like we just promote to the EU parliament to get rid of them.
  - allendoerfer 6y ago
    There are no people west of Paris after all!
  - marton78 6y ago
    Hast du einen Opa, schick ihn nach Europa!

DiogenesKynikos 6y ago

Guttenberg had to resign because his doctoral thesis was full of plagiarism. Even the introduction was plagiarized - but with small changes that made it clear that an attempt had been made to hide the plagiarism. Guttenberg's public image rested on the idea that he was a morally upright, well composed, competent businessman, along with his noble lineage and family castle. The revelations about his thesis destroyed his credibility. This is rather different from financial corruption of the sort hinted at in this article.

levosmetalo 6y ago
At least he resigned when he was caught. Francisca Giffey, the Family Minister, never resigned when her doctor thesis was found plagiarized. Also von der Leyen, former German Defense Minister and current European Commission leader didn't resign when she was found that she falsified her official CV.
- DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
  Guttenberg tried to hold onto his position. He at first rejected the accusations, even though they had already been extremely well documented: > Ich bin gerne bereit zu prüfen, ob bei über 1200 Fußnoten und 475 Seiten vereinzelt Fußnoten nicht oder nicht korrekt gesetzt sein sollten und würde dies bei einer Neuauflage berücksichtigen > I am perfectly willing to check whether in any of the over 1200 footnotes and 475 pages individual footnotes were not - or not correctly - inserted, and to correct this in a new edition. Guttenberg kept to this position for a week, while Angela Merkel and most of the government supported him. In the end, though, the extensive plagiarism (93% of the pages have at least one known instance of plagiarism) in his dissertation was so well documented that it was impossible to deny, and his statements about possibly having made a few mistakes here and there also looked more and more like outright lies. Nobody plagiarizes to that extent by mistake.
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    " or a contract to friend's friend's construction company" Is absolutely corruption. Years ago I did a high level IR/HR course at BT where this sort of low level corruption was one of the most common types of serious misconduct. Of course getting investigated by BT Security is not a happy fun experience.

bluelu 6y ago

Funny thing about Gutenberg is that he was also lobbying the german government in favor of Wirecard. https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/karl-theodor-zu-guttenberg-opposition-will-aufklaerung-ueber-lobbyarbeit-fuer-wirecard-bei-der-bundesregierung-a-a777e389-8388-4edc-b75f-22ff22906962 https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/karl-theodor-zu-g...

mschuster91 6y ago
Not just that, Guttenberg was also a key figure in the "Augustus Intelligence" corruption scandal of Philipp Amthor.
- hef19898 6y ago
  Both, he is quite your guy for that. Kind of the lobbying equivalent of SoftBank, as soon as he's involved, probability of things being fishy increased significantly.

arcturus17 6y ago

Being Spanish yet having lived in Germany for quite some time, I agree with you... I'm not saying there's no corruption in Germany - I think there's always going to be some level corruption at a certain scale of state - but there's no need to go as far as China or Russia for comparison. Just come to the South of Europe for a taste of what grand-scale corruption in what are otherwise (seemingly) high-functioning democracies... I remember watching a Brazilian high government official (Justice minister?) on Anderson Cooper mentioning that Lava Jato had seen ~3 USD billion disappear, as Cooper reacted with a wide-eyed grin... And I thought to myself, huh, that's arguably the largest national corruption scandal in Brazil in recent history, and it's about the same size as the "EREs case" [1] in Spain, which was a regional affair, and where ~3 EUR billion also disappeared. One of many perpetrated by both main political parties in the last couple of decades. Like I say, I don't think Germany is without corruption, but it's a matter of gradation - it's hard to label it as an "insanely corrupt" country seeing what's out here. [1] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caso_ERE_en_Andaluc%C3%ADa https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caso_ERE_en_Andaluc%C3%ADa

levosmetalo 6y ago
The issue is people are just not aware on the corruption in Germany because there's no "personal" and "everyday" corruption in a daily life. But if you look "up" the amount of corruption rise to the astonishing levels. Just remember Stuttgart 21 or the Berlin Airport, Hamburg Elb Philharmonic, Battleship Gorch Fock. Germany is full of such corrupt projects, it's obvious and everyone knows about it, but nobody yet went to jail because of it.
- awakeasleep 6y ago
  This resonates with me as an american. I dont think there is any amount of money i could offer to safely escape a drunk driving ticket, however the ceo of my company was the head of the board for an security company, and we were forced to use their products despite an unimaginable amount of flaws. The second the security company was sold we were allowed to drop every aspect of that company, 10 huge enterprise products, and the entire IT and Security organizations both agreed that throwing out the whole years roadmap and working to switch vendors as soon as possible was the best use of our time. Thats a small example of pure and utter -yet legal- corruption. There is no world in which that vendor was the right choice for a single product let alone 10. Except the world where the CEO could make the productivity of one company fungible with the revenue of another.

theelous3 6y ago

Losing your job just doesn't even register as an actual consequence when it comes to high level corruption though. Like maybe we should take their lollipops too? No TV before dinner?

levosmetalo 6y ago

Even though losing the job is not a punishment, not everyone even lost his job. Andreas Sheuer is still in charge of transport as a federal Minister, despite the 500,000,000 € heavy corruption scandal. Von der Leyen got even "promoted" to EU-lead position after heavy corruption scandal last year when she was a Defense Minister of Germany. Not only Germany, but in the whole EU commission leadership it would be hard to find someone without corruption scandal, accusation or conviction.

allendoerfer 6y ago
Scheuer is my personal pet peeve. His last act was to create road traffic regulations, except he made some procedural errors, so 16 states have to roll them back and implement them again once it has been properly voted on the law. All that after evaporating 500.000.000 € in a pissing contest everyone knew he was going to lose. The guy is corrupt and comically incompetent, but he just seems invincible. Why is he still in office? My theory is, that it has something to do with his dialect and his overall slightly idiotic appeareance. Though not on the same level as Trump or Boris Johnson, still that seems to give him some sort of protection, because people do not expect anything from him in the first place. But then again, like OP correctly said: Europes leader has a corruption scandal at home, deleted evidence, the whole thing, but just keeps doing her thing.
- Grollicus 6y ago
  > Why is he still in office The answer to that question is called the CSU. But they are losing ground in Bavaria so there's hope.
  - allendoerfer 6y ago
    They will also provide the next chancellor of Germany, so I am not that hopeful yet.
    - pantalaimon 6y ago
      Söder?

rasz 6y ago

You are technically not wrong. I mean Hans-Georg Maassen, head of BfV (spy agency), did lose his job. Not after sharing secret information with neo nazis, that wasnt enough. He doubled down by calling fake news at a video showing neo nazis chasing/beating immigrants. Had to leave his BfV presidency ... for a higher paying position at the interior ministry ;-) aka promotion.

s9w 6y ago
That is not what happened at all.
- formerly_proven 6y ago
  That's true and you are getting downvoted incorrectly. At first the interior minister wanted to move him to another equally well-paid position, but due to political backlash and also Maasen insisting there is a "radical left cabal" against him inside the government was retired early, which is still very much a golden parachute, but also the intended way for the government to remove political officials from office.
  - rasz 6y ago
    Retired to join law firm he was fighting while heading BfV. Clearly no conflict of interest there. https://www.dw.com/en/german-ex-spy-chief-maassen-to-join-law-firm-that-represented-afd/a-50650274 https://www.dw.com/en/german-ex-spy-chief-maassen-to-join-la... I hope the revolving door didnt hit him in the ass.
- konradha 6y ago
  How so?
  - s9w 6y ago
    politics is verboten here

freeflight 6y ago

> Christian Wulff (Former German President), Guttenberg (former Defence Minister) None of these two served any prison sentences. Wulff was acquitted after he refused to pay 20k € to make it instantly go away and even had damages paid. Guttenberg was caught plagiarizing for his doctoral dissertation, which is a rather common thing among German politicans. As a consequence he lost some public clout, but instead wrote a book for even more publicity, afaik right now he's doing some work for Springer in the US, biding his time for a another comeback in German politics. Meanwhile to this day even Kohl's donation scandal, hasn't seen any proper investigation, nor the Amigo-scandal, NSU-scandal, nor the countless others, particularly on a local state level. Heck, just look at people like Mehdorn and projects like the BER construction site: He, being such a highly renowned and well paid manager, was supposed to fix that mess. Nothing was fixed, the whole thing is still a massive mess, political consequences for anybody actually responsible? Pretty much zero. The thing is: We Germans are very good about keeping up appearances, as a result of that inconvenient truths and topics often fall by the wayside.