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

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.

None of those are examples of corruption, unless you have an almost unlimited understanding of what constitutes corruption.

Fun fact, for a very long time German companies could declare bribes paid abroad in their taxes. Legally. Seems that a lot of people didn't get the memo that bribery was, indeed, illegal now.

Surprisingly realistic policy, considering that bribery is simply part of everyday business in some locales.

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.

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-buy-new-york-citys-get-out-of-...

If a guy owns a company, I don't doubt that he believes it's the best at what they do. The one thing most CEOs I've met have in common is they ridiculously overestimate how great their companies are. This guy probably genuinely believed his security company was the best choice. It's "not invented here" on the scale of companies instead of git repos.

A classic problem parties have is that they need to take care of their party militants and their families. This typically creates economic activities (insurance, banks, investment funds, charities, community organizations, ..) that are aligned on party lines.

These companies are part of the party infrastructure and are used as power-bases to influence the party as well.

It's called patronage and is rampant in western democracies.

Sadly (luckily?) this wasn't corruption but plain out retarded levels of incompetence...

It’s like Putin - you could call him a democratic asshole, but you would never call him incompetent in politics - because if he was, he wouldn’t be alive by now.

Is this an idiom wherewith I'm unfamiliar?

The client was constantly allowed to adjust plans.

I've worked as architect on similar sized projects. You can't allow clients and esp. committees to change direction at all. This a breach of contract. With hospitals, universities, concert halls and airports you need to be strict to the local government, which is the client in such cases. They are no experts, they change every 4 years, they exhibit irrational behavior sitting in a committee.

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...

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.

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.

The answer to that question is called the CSU. But they are losing ground in Bavaria so there's hope.

You can't arrest someone on account of them being an idiot.

It's the responsibility of the other party members and especially the opposition to demand him being removed from office.

Funnily enough the Green Party demanded exactly that, but then again that's the same party that wants general speed limits...

So yeah, of course any party that wants to get reelected in Germany will stand behind that clown, as long as that clown fights for "Freie Fahrt für freie Bürger!" and lets them keep their drivers license, because 21 km/h above the speed limit is just a trivial offence...

I think it should be. You get the power over large sums of money and for that you’re liable with your life.

We're all just human after all and making mistakes is part of the human condition.

There’s so much that comes with the power that it’s a very shallow argument to make.

No but you can sure fire them, in the private sector at least.

The 21 km/h above the speed limit would probably not make the auto industry very happy. What good is a Porsche if one needs to drive slowly?

that seems an exaggeration, off the top of my head Gentiloni[0] (economics) has not been involved in any corruption scandal or accusation that I know of, nor was Timmermans[1] (VP).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_Gentiloni [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_Timmermans

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.

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.

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.

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.

Feel free to disagree with that. I stand by my point on account of the lack of transparency (e.g. no obligation to make ancillary income public) and the legality of the "Revolving Door"-effect.

Government officials in Germany are free to leave office for private enterprise with no restrictions. Public officers have to report lobbying jobs to their former office for 5 years, but the worst that can happen if they don't is loosing their pension.

The latter is not much of a problem, though, if the new employer just pays well enough...

This leads to CFOs of DAX companies becoming government officials in the ministry of finance; public officers serving in the ministry for radiation protection who dealt with interim storage facilities to leave office for (nuclear-) energy companies, and so on.

Holding politicians to higher standards than the law is delusional. Politicians are humans, too. None of them are Jesus Christ incarnate and none of them should be either, because in a democracy they should represent The People, not some Utopian ideal.

> It boggles my mind how many politicians have such obvious conflicts of interest that manage to retain approval of their constituents.

That's because in Germany, nobody knows that there even is a conflict of interests, because politicians aren't obligated to make additional income public.

A reasonable first step would be to make that mandatory (you don't even have to disclose exact sums of money, but it helps knowing that your representative has a paid seat in some board of directors on the side).

That is an assumption on your part. In the absence of thorough investigations that would condemn or exonerate them, it is difficult to say. Of course, it would be very twisted to say that the lack of investigations is proof of real corruption. Still, it should also not be taken as prrof of no corruption.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Guttenberg was even the main candidate to direct some sort of "Internet security/ethics" department (don't remember anymore exactly what it was)? What kind of joke is that?

Von der Leyen was involved in the story about spending a lot of $ for external contracting companies & other stuff, then she got "promoted" to the EU-level => another joke, for me.

https://www.dw.com/en/german-ex-spy-chief-maassen-to-join-la...

I hope the revolving door didnt hit him in the ass.

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.