The former Chancellor, who is close to Vladimir Putin, could be stripped of his offices and part of his budget, which is financed by German taxpayers.
The federal government wants to reverse the advantages associated with Vladimir Putin, including the allocation of offices, the finance minister announced on Saturday.
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It is “no longer conceivable that taxpayers would make an office available to him,” explains the former chancellor (1998-2005), explains Christian Lindner in the newspapers of the Funke Group. “We should draw the consequences” from Gerhard Schröder’s refusal to end his responsibility in several Russian groups and to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
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400,000 euros per year for taxpayers
As former Chancellor, he is still entitled to several offices in the House of Representatives and to a staff budget. A privilege that costs taxpayers 400,000 euros a year. “The former top officials, who are clearly on the side of criminal governments, cannot count on state support,” Christian Lindner asserts.
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The benefits granted to Gerhard Schröder could thus be reduced in the context of the upcoming debates about the 2023 budget: “It would make sense to standardize the equipment of former top civil servants and to reduce it over time. In this context, we should also talk about a kind of code of conduct,” adds Christian Lindner, chairman of the FDP, a member of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition.
A massive figure
The pressure is mounting around Gerhard Schröder, 77, who has received honorary awards from several cities and has been targeted by calls for his expulsion from the SPD. He has become an unwieldy figure, including for the current head of government, Olaf Scholz, whose mentor he was.
The controversy flared up again after an interview broadcast by the New York Times last weekend, in which Gerhard Schröder asserted that he had no intention of giving up his mandates in Russian companies and would not do so unless Moscow did so would stop its gas supplies to Germany. A scenario he said he didn’t believe.
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Most of the former European leaders who sat on the boards of Russian companies before the war in Ukraine have since resigned. The former chancellor is chairman of the shareholders’ committee of Nord Stream AG, the controversial gas pipeline between Russia and Germany without an operating permit, and chairman of the supervisory board of Rosneft, Russia’s leading oil company.
Germany has long practiced a policy of outreach to Russia, following the notion that developing trade would bring about a gradual democratization of the country.
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