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.

>Stuttgart 21 or the Berlin Airport, Hamburg Elb Philharmonic, Battleship Gorch Fock

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

There is a small group of actors that benefits from these projects. The bribery part is hard to prove, I give you that, but it is very likely.

Bribery isn't "hard to prove" but instead there are no credible bribery accusations at all. Missmanagement in massive infrastructure projects are a much more reasonable explanation. It also makes a lot of sense because the actors are often state government officials that have never overseen a comparable project. Planning an airport or a new flagship concert hall is difficult. I agree that there were serious mistakes but they can be very well explained by incompetence rather than bribery.

And this cluelessness is then abused by contractors. With flanking maneuvers targeting political leadership. No clear cut corruption, but the lines get blurry.

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.

> 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.

Of course they would, in some places it's just the way business is done. At least if they declare it, you can plan for it when executing projects abroad.

Why would the management of a massive project be given to a group that has no experience with such a massive project?

There's a podcast on this. "How to fuck up an airport". The short answer is that all the bids were realistic-ish, and therefore too high for the budget. So the Berlin politicians went "We'll do it ourselves! Much cheaper!". And lo and behold...

Any number of reasons. Maybe they had the lowest bid?

Well, it’s not hard to mismanage something especially if you want to mismanage it.

There have been multiple corruption cases surrounding BER which also explains the level of incompetence at display here.

You are correct regarding the BER, apparently there have been some corruption accusations I didn't know about!

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.

> I dont think there is any amount of money i could offer to safely escape a drunk driving ticket

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

I think this example is why the appearance of a conflict of interest should be the standard for navigating ethical concerns.

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.

Thats not in any sense corruption.

It is in the sense of gross conflict of interest, very obviously. The board should have canned him, but I'm guessing they are all old friends...

I'd wager these are less cases of individual corruption than party-corruption aka horse-trading for influence and decisions.

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.

> Berlin Airport

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

Sustained gross incompetence is usually a mask for corruption. Without the corruption, normal corrective mechanisms that minimize products of incompetence elsewhere are allowed to operate.

Sustained gross incompetence is the norm when it comes to megaprojects like Berlin Airport. Late and very over budget is the norm for projects originally budgeted to cost over $1 billion. You don’t need bribes or backhanders.

I think this amount of money should imply certain existential risk: if you have that power then you are inherently liable.

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.

>you could call him a democratic asshole

Is this an idiom wherewith I'm unfamiliar?

That’s not even incompetence. Dit is Berlin!

I would not blame incompetence. Same things happen in SW projects all the time. It was wrong planning and organization.

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.

Hopefully the newly created EPPO would fix some of that, at least the ones involving fraud with EU funds.

Power corrupts.