>I can just hope the Germans learn lessons from this.
N'ah! When it comes to big banks, big industry, big infra projects, German state institutions are super corrupt, it makes Wall Street and the City of London look like saints.
N'ah! When it comes to big banks, big industry, big infra projects, German state institutions are super corrupt, it makes Wall Street and the City of London look like saints.
The mandate from the EU is that all kinds of stuff must be offered via tender europe-wide which is for many things a colossal waste of money and enviromental resources (e.g. a Polish company wins a tender for a construction project in Spain and now has to move all the machinery and staff through Europe and back, that's NOT sustainable!), and while government entities are allowed to judge bids by sustainability or profitability (i.e. purposefully offering an unprofitable bid in the hopes of making the profit with exploiting "change requests"), they rarely have the knowledge to do so.
If some costs aren't being priced in, then procedures should be changed to price them appropriately. I'm not sure the answer is to permit cosy deals between politicians and their patron companies, or depriving citizens of the services of best providers in the market.
Whilst you'd hope that lessons were learned, I'm not sure they were.
€1.9bn is pocket money compared to Wall St's and the City's more creative frauds.
The UK is currently dealing with a government minister who was involved in questionable planning oversight for a single development scheme worth £1bn - and that's barely even a footnote in the news here.
Especially compared to - say - the suppressed Russia report, or the non-existent disclosure about the true sources of funding for Brexit, or the fact that the government wasted £12m on an app that does nothing, or the sum total of various other Brexit- and Covid-related contracts to various government cronies, donors, and associates, and which appear to have supplied nothing of value to taxpayers.
Nobody went to jail for any of those and in some cases it was never investigated. If you're on the DAX, you're untouchable in Germany.
[Translated from German] Christian Schwarz-Schilling had been Post Minister under Helmut Kohl since 1982 and launched the German mobile phone network at the end of the 1980s. His political understanding of infrastructure can be seen in a disturbing fact: Until a few hours (!) before he was sworn in as Post Minister - Schwarz-Schilling was involved in a copper cable company. He sold his shares to Nixdorf. The company was then "one of the most important newcomers in the cable business". Contrary to most expert advice, Schwarz-Schilling pushed the extensive investment in copper cable instead of fibre optics during his term of office, in other words: politically, he acted entirely in the interests of the buyer of his shares. In any case, exactly 30 years ago, SPIEGEL called the mobile phone licensing for which Schwarz-Schilling was responsible "a festival of lobbyists".
The fact that nobody got jailed for this obvious corruption is staggering to me and German politicians dare lecture Southern Europe on corruption.
That being said - we will certainly see a lot of fraud in other countries too. The fraud cycle follows the business cycle.
The broad classifications are probably alright, but I wouldn't pay much attention to the specific rankings.