Either way using relativism to minimise a crime is sophistry
"I murdered a few people - the US government kills thousands of people a year in <current war>" - you're still guilty of murder, even if someone is better at the crime than you are.
Again: Although there were a parliamentary investigations, there was no crime. No conviction, no indictment, no charges pressed.
300M € was what was spent on all external consultancies combined. The yearly Bundeswehr budget is 42 bln € [1]. 300M is < 1%.
In 2018, the big four (KPMG, PwC, EY and Deloitte) extracted 650M € from the 30 DAX companies alone. And that is just the auditor segment. This doesn't include the strategic consultancies, IT consultancies or Headhunters.
And it also doesn't include the consultancy subsidiaries of said DAX companies. Speaking of subsidiary consultancies: 2/3 of said 300M € "embazzled Bundeswehr money" were spent on it's own consultancy BDI.
This whole "Affair" just resides on general public resentment of the word "consultant" and the public's inability and unwillingness to calculate or research these numbers themself. Especially as soon as there is a "smoking gun" to find by focusing all efforts on looking the other way, which allows us to create a hoax like this.
[1] German: "Milliarde"
Compared to 650M € and 30 DAX companies, 300M € spent by one single "company" do not sound like peanuts, especially since AFAIK the latter money was only meant for IT services & infrastructure(?)
> 2/3 of said 300M € "embazzled Bundeswehr money" were spent on it's own consultancy BDI.
I suppose you meant BWI, as in https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/BWI_GmbH ?
I also like to point out that of those political groups that were screaming foul the loudest with regards to the "consultant affair", these were the groups with the least interest in or sympathy to the German military.
Which is adding insult to injury because the whole reason the Bundeswehr has to hike its expenditures on consultants at all is because policies of the last decades, specifically of those groups, left the Bundeswehr one of the least attractive employers in the whole country, especially for seeked after talent.
Are you saying that Blue Chip to Mid Cap Stock Index companies regularly spend > 1B on consulting?