MAXIM SCHEMETOV / Portal
Gerhard Schröder, June 6, 2019 at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
INTERNATIONAL – The showdown between Gerhard Schröder and his country’s Chamber of Deputies continues. The former German chancellor, who has become a nuisance over his ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, has launched a court case against the Bundestag, stripping him of some of his benefits, his lawyer said on Friday, August 12 AFP with.
The information about a lawsuit is “correct,” said attorney Michael Nagel. In addition, a spokesman for the Berlin Administrative Court confirmed that a complaint had actually been filed.
In May, the Bundestag voted to strip the former Social Democratic prime minister, who ruled from 1999 to 2005, of some of his benefits as ex-chancellor, including state-sponsored posts. The members of parliament then made sure that “in view of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the consequences of his behavior (…) were drawn,” according to the budget committee of the Bundestag.
Schröder, fired by some of his employees
As former chancellor, he was entitled to several offices in the Chamber of Deputies and was allocated a budget for hiring staff. A privilege that costs taxpayers 400,000 euros a year. Dumped by some of his collaborators in recent months, he nevertheless retained his police protection and old-age pension as ex-chancellor.
But his lawyer ruled on Friday morning on NDR that this decision was “illegal” and that Gerhard Schröder “only found out everything from the media”. According to Michael Nagel, he also had no opportunity to speak to the parliamentary committee responsible for deciding on these benefits. The Bundestag did not want to comment on this complaint at this point in time.
Gerhard Schröder, 78, struck up a friendship with the Russian president in the early 2000s, whom he described in 2004 as the “perfect democrat”. The former boss, who was a mentor to current Chancellor Olaf Scholz, decided in May to step down from the board of oil company Rosneft, saying he had given up moving to that of gas giant Gazprom.
But unlike most former European leaders who sat on the boards of Russian companies before the war, Gerhard Schröder, who was also heavily involved in Nord Stream AG, the disputed gas pipelines between Russia and Germany, was slow to step down from his various functions back. However, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) decided this week to keep him in their ranks.
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