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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

Also, under Helmut Kohl, despite advice from experts to use fiber, the German government wired the whole country with copper instead because the ministry of infrastructure at the time had stocks in the copper business leaving the country's internet behind Ukraine or Belarus.[1]

If you're on the DAX or a politician, you're untouchable in Germany and lots of people inside and outside of Germany have no idea of how insanely corrupt the German government and their corporate buddies are.

Sure, it's not like Russia or the CCP and you're not in danger of being suicided if you uncover some high level dirt but nobody really ever gets punished when obvious corruption gets proven so I have no idea how they always manage to looks so good in the corruption statistics.

[1] https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/deutschland-warum-unsere...

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Germany is notable for its lack of “retail” or low level corruption (cops don’t take bribes, you can get a building permit by following the rules, etc). One of the best in the world.

But at the highest levels the opposite prevails, up there with France or even the US. Not Kleptocracy by any means, but bad by OECD standards. Because it’s so institutionalized it doesn’t really appear in those “corruption index” reports that NGOs like to produce.

I'm from Romania.

You don't know how good you have it. The low level corruption is the thing that eats away at your soul and poisons your day to day life.

High level corruption? Awful, but we have that too.

But having to bribe the nurse so that your grandma gets painkillers (or toilet paper!) in the hospital? Having to bribe the police officer to get your driver's license? Having to bribe the lady at the counter working for the City Hall, so that you can actually get papers you need this year, not 2 years from now?

That really messes with your head!

They have it so good because they complain about stuff that is trivial relative to countries like Romania. It's a constant battle and to be satisfied is to give up.

Yeah, right. Survivor bias in action. Romania didn't choose to do a lot of the things it did. It didn't choose to be a Communist state for 45 years, for example. History matters.

And if you think Romanians are somehow content:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017%E2%80%932019_Romanian_p...

They were in the news everywhere, from Deutsch Welle to the New York Times.

I find your comment dismissive of those down the ladder, maybe I'm misinterpreting it. It also seems unaware of history or recent news.

Well, the fact that Romania is even less democratic that Germany doesn’t change the fact that Germany couldn’t be more democratic. And to be fair I would prefer if Romanians figured out their democracy themselves rather than have another proxy war happening there now.

What do you mean by proxy war? Romania is quite peaceful.

What do you think is going to happen if a wester state brought military to help you with corruption?

Who asked for military help?

How do you think the west should get rid of your corruption then?

You are misinterpreting, it was thinking about how to be robust, not critiquing Romania

Ah, ok then :-)

To any individual lower corruption is what that matters most. However as a country it is higher level corruption that costs you the most , all the money governments are spending without oversight on Coronavirus response for example . This is lot costlier to the country than a beat cop taking a bribe .

Most ngos and corruption indices focus too much on lower level corruption instead of both.

I believe you are underestimating the negative drag low level corruption has on the economy. It means setting up businesses or conducting any commercial activity is slow and fraught with hidden costs and risks. Information isn't usually freely available and solving problems usually involes "knowing someone" and going through backchannels.

oh? sounds like trying to figure out why FAANG closed your developer account :-P

Do FAANGs burn down your office and break your legs?

Perhaps it was a tasteless joke... I was commenting on how you seem to need to post on HN to get any support from the FAANGs.

Maybe not that, but pay off the police to seize your servers? That's table stakes for a multinational in a region where they have the necessary influence.

I think something that could be called corruption is everywhere once you know what to look for. The difference is that normal people in Western Europe and the Nordics don't know what to look for.

Bringing a bottle of expensive vodka to smooth over some bureaucratic procedure is nothing compared to what goes on in the big leagues.

Something to keep in mind, corruption indexes like this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index are actually about the perception of corruption. After all it's the only thing that's easy to measure.

How do you figure out which situations require a bribe and in which situation it would be "inappropriate"?

Is there a "usual fee" for your driving license?

At least in the recent literature, that retail corruption is called "market corruption"--this is what we hear about the most when we talk about corruption in India, Nigeria, etc. There is another variety, more pernicious form of corruption, it is called "network corruption": here, corruption is a product of collusion between various groups over the long term. In the developed world, that's what we see, and it is hard to prevent collusive corruption, since there is no money trail. People leave their jobs as staffers to powerful politicians, and then join the k-street.

I agree, it's quite weird. Low level corruption exists but I'd say 99 % of the time it isn't and can't be bought but is awarded through social connections instead.

I suppose corruption at higher levels has greater incentives and is harder to eliminate than low-level corruption (perhaps). I wonder if there are any books on the subject - general principles of how corruption develops and decays.

My impression is that during the formative decades of West German power structures (let's say late Adenauer to early Kohl), the entire surrounding culture of media, regulators and of course politicians and business people themselves, failed to develop an awareness for corruption because everything was so nicely self-regulated by what basically boils down to modesty. In terms of anti-corruption measures it was like that nice village where nobody locks their front door. Now decades of neoliberal ideology have swept away that modesty, greed has slowly shifted from vice to virtue, but the trust is still there. Now working as a deceptive national brand that is quickly crumbling away, without a replacement (reliable countermeasures) in sight.

Oh, the Kohl days have been corrupt enough. A lot as related scandals happened and started then. With the political changes after Kohl it just became harder to keep them covered up. Schreiber is name that came up often enough, and of course Franz-Josef Strauss, the Bavarian political king pin and capo of all Bavarian amigos. And a staunch right leaning conservative.

> Now decades of neoliberal ideology have swept away that modesty, greed has slowly shifted from vice to virtue, but the trust is still there.

Please explain your definition of “neoliberal” to us.

> Please explain your definition of “neoliberal” to us.

"Everything I hate", same as everyone else.

Someone who complains about everything that is good instead of everything that is bad.

Yeah, heard the same about Britain being “so much more liberal back in the days”.

My bet is that isn’t true.

All western countries are corrupt. The difference from the usual suspects is the way it's done. If in Russia, it may be as simple as cash in hand, in Germany or Britain it will be kids placement into a nice job, maybe a donation to a family run charity org, or a contract to friend's friend's construction company. Or even the good old one,where you do a favour and 5-7 years later, once not in government position anymore,get a board seat in some large conglomerate.The opportunities are endless.

It used to be that way. Right now in the United States, the level of corruption that we see is absolutely off the charts and out in the open.

It's akin to a strange alien weapon for most Americans, that goes off near you, putting you in a state of trance, and you don't even know what's happening.

There is brazenness and blatancy to it, as in "yeah, I did it, what are YOU going to do about it?"

In many other countries the remedy is torches and pitchforks, but here in the U.S. the crime syndicate infesting Washington D.C. is protected by a thick layer of laws and "norms". That's why William Barr can go on TV and say things like "winners write history". Try that shit elsewhere and see what happens.

In the developing world, corruption is quiet, it's subtle. No one is supposed to know you have 5 summer houses, because that makes people jealous and very very stabby. And that's the difference.

I only see it because I grew up in post-Soviet Ukraine. Americans don't have that unfortunate experience.

It's been this way for a while (forever?) in the US... Dick Cheney helped start a war (that killed something like 500,000 people) on knowingly false pretenses partly so that he could give his company Halliburton a $7 billion dollar no-bid contract.

That's pretty standard corruption. But the Bush administration, as rotten as it was, would at least provide schools with resources to open.

Right now that's not happening. Why? Because there is no money in it. You can't get a kickback from a school, you can't get a lobbying gig, you can't get a board seat. There is nothing to gain.

> > in the US... Dick Cheney helped start a war (that killed something like 500,000 people) on knowingly false pretenses

> That's pretty standard corruption. But the Bush administration, as rotten as it was, would at least provide schools with resources to open.

By what measure is killing half a million people, standard corruption?

(and you didn't really mean to say that's okay when they would at least provide schools with resources to open ... did you?)

He could get Halliburton billion dollar contracts without a war. Claiming that was a reason for the war trivializes the actual thought process that led to it.

No, it's not that bad in America.

The corruption we see in DE is similar to that of US and even Canada - and it's of a different kinds.

It's not corruption in the classical sense, it actually is rational for the state to prefer copper, if the state has investments in copper - in a kind of perverse way.

Less rational and borderline corruption if an individual state actor has personal investments in copper.

'Big Business' is often done on the basis of relationship, of the advice of consultants, and it's far more of a systematic thing than an overt thing.

For example, there is quite a lot of oversight for things like insider trading, and such shenanigans. People are not taking bribes.

It's rational for congressional members to 'fight' for the big government contract to be located in their district, even if it's not the ideal outcome.

This kind of network/influence dysfunction is a huge issue, and it deserves it's own name, because it operates in a different way, has different results and is way more nuanced.

That said it can have major impacts and it is a big deal, it should not be ignored, but it should be recognized as another category.

FYI - if contractors, suppliers etc. all did a really good job, it would matter less. There may or may not have been shenanigans in the allocating to CGI for the big Healthcare.gov project, but the worst part is that it was a failure. If CGI had of done a great job ... well that reduces the issue of how contracts are awarded.

The city of Montreal had some serious problems with low-level 'corruption' when handing out city contracts - as it turns out, it was partly bad acting, but partly because there was no concept of transparency, bidding, no proper systems and checks for how procurement is made, leaving the door open to city officials getting to go to expensive dinners etc..

It's an issue, but of a different kind.

I think the issues you've enumerated are actually different types of corruption (or not corruption at all)

A country preferring copper internet because they have large stocks of copper (which makes the project cheaper) is arguably the right thing to do. If it turns out it's a bad decision in the long run (because the negative impact of slow internet outweighs the savings brought by the cheap copper), that's just a bad investment. At worst, it's a mismanaged government.

An individual doing something to gain personal benefits (i.e. Cheney) is more regular, high level-corruption.

Somewhere in between the two, you get regulatory capture.

Then you have things like Old Boys' Clubs where you can't get hired in high-paying jobs unless you went to school with the right people. I'd call that an unequal society.

These are different types of problems which require radically different solutions.

It wasn't Germany that had stocks in the copper company, it was the politician who made the decision that had them.

You're being downvoted because network effects aren't the same as corruption. Although it is certainly unpleasant to consider that government officials might be making decisions more favorable to one company than another in the hope or expectation that that they will get a board seat five years hence, it is worth noting that if they upset one company now, they may get the board seat on the other company. And since anything can happen in five years, it may in many cases make better sense to make the right decision, rather than the self-interested decision. Moreover, quite independent of any decisions they make, they remain valuable since they have contacts and know government processes.

So cash in hand is a bazillion times worse than a board seat.

You might have a point if one of the reliable features of privatisations in the UK over the last few decades hadn't been a steady stream of ministers pushing through privatisation - often at significant public cost - and then parachuting straight into the board of the privatised company.

This is a bazillion times worse than cash in an envelope, because it's straightforward larceny of public resources, papered over with some thin PR nonsense about "efficiency".

This current government isn't even pretending to do anything else. There have been so many no-bid contracts for "PPE supply" handed out to cronies with no PPE experience - and no PPE delivered, while lethal shortages continue - that there are are now formal legal challenges working their way through the courts.

> This current government isn't even pretending to do anything else.

The current government in the UK is uniquely poor compared to every UK government that has come before it. The situation there does not extend to "western nations" in general - just those run by incompetent/malignant (take your pick) populists.

The populists may have dispensed with the pretense of claiming not to be corrupt, but the corruption the parent describes was certainly there long before they came on the scene.

I think your core statement highlights the bigger problem with our progression as a society overall;

We don't eliminate corruption as we 'advance', but instead we just keep abstracting it away until the less observant don't see it as corruption but instead some form of 'networking'.

The amount of public money you can funnel out or funnel in by cash in hand is limited to actual cash in hand. The level of corruption at the highest levels are on the order of a billion euros. I am not sure if you can get even close to billions of euros in corruption using only cash.

Network effects is value-free description. Corruption is how network effects are judged.

Good job rationalizing it. All cash bribes put together might be about as much as one fat government subsidy.

>If you're on the DAX or a politician, you're untouchable in Germany and lots of people inside and outside of Germany have no idea of how insanely corrupt the German government and their corporate buddies are.

This is obviously not true. There have been numerous uncovered political scandals in Germany that have led to politicians and managers loosing their job. Christian Wulff (Former German President), Guttenberg (former Defence Minister), etc.

Being Spanish yet having lived in Germany for quite some time, I agree with you...

I'm not saying there's no corruption in Germany - I think there's always going to be some level corruption at a certain scale of state - but there's no need to go as far as China or Russia for comparison. Just come to the South of Europe for a taste of what grand-scale corruption in what are otherwise (seemingly) high-functioning democracies...

I remember watching a Brazilian high government official (Justice minister?) on Anderson Cooper mentioning that Lava Jato had seen ~3 USD billion disappear, as Cooper reacted with a wide-eyed grin... And I thought to myself, huh, that's arguably the largest national corruption scandal in Brazil in recent history, and it's about the same size as the "EREs case" [1] in Spain, which was a regional affair, and where ~3 EUR billion also disappeared. One of many perpetrated by both main political parties in the last couple of decades.

Like I say, I don't think Germany is without corruption, but it's a matter of gradation - it's hard to label it as an "insanely corrupt" country seeing what's out here.

[1] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caso_ERE_en_Andaluc%C3%ADa

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.

It seems like a couple of years ago, once you fucked up, you resigned out of respect to your office/job/position.

Looking at our current Minister of Transport 'Andi Scheuer', this does not seem to be the case any more. He is still in office after burning more than € 500M in the recent toll scandal [0].

[0]: https://www.dw.com/en/german-transport-minister-blasted-over...

Or even worse, von der Leyen got promoted to be head of the EU. I mean, wtf!

This really pissed me off. I mean she had been shown to be both bad at her job and corrupt and instead of kicking here out they promoted her away.

That's been a rather old joke among Germans: Politicians we don't like we just promote to the EU parliament to get rid of them.

Hast du einen Opa, schick ihn nach Europa!

There are no people west of Paris after all!

Even though losing the job is not a punishment, not everyone even lost his job.

Andreas Sheuer is still in charge of transport as a federal Minister, despite the 500,000,000 € heavy corruption scandal.

Von der Leyen got even "promoted" to EU-lead position after heavy corruption scandal last year when she was a Defense Minister of Germany.

Not only Germany, but in the whole EU commission leadership it would be hard to find someone without corruption scandal, accusation or conviction.

Scheuer is my personal pet peeve. His last act was to create road traffic regulations, except he made some procedural errors, so 16 states have to roll them back and implement them again once it has been properly voted on the law. All that after evaporating 500.000.000 € in a pissing contest everyone knew he was going to lose.

The guy is corrupt and comically incompetent, but he just seems invincible. Why is he still in office? My theory is, that it has something to do with his dialect and his overall slightly idiotic appeareance. Though not on the same level as Trump or Boris Johnson, still that seems to give him some sort of protection, because people do not expect anything from him in the first place.

But then again, like OP correctly said: Europes leader has a corruption scandal at home, deleted evidence, the whole thing, but just keeps doing her thing.

> Why is he still in office

The answer to that question is called the CSU. But they are losing ground in Bavaria so there's hope.

The day the CSU is not the majority party in Bavaria anymore is the day freezes over. Only to melt up again when the new government starts scratching the surface of 70 years of CSU governance, friction heat of doing will be significant.

They will also provide the next chancellor of Germany, so I am not that hopeful yet.

Söder?

The problem is that gross incompetence is not a crime.

You can't arrest someone on account of them being an idiot.

It's the responsibility of the other party members and especially the opposition to demand him being removed from office.

Funnily enough the Green Party demanded exactly that, but then again that's the same party that wants general speed limits...

So yeah, of course any party that wants to get reelected in Germany will stand behind that clown, as long as that clown fights for "Freie Fahrt für freie Bürger!" and lets them keep their drivers license, because 21 km/h above the speed limit is just a trivial offence...

> The problem is that gross incompetence is not a crime

I think it should be. You get the power over large sums of money and for that you’re liable with your life.

Problem is, you wouldn't find anyone willing to take that job then.

We're all just human after all and making mistakes is part of the human condition.

I think it’s a comfortable lie people say.

There’s so much that comes with the power that it’s a very shallow argument to make.

Nice system you've got set up where it's the job of the opposition party to demand removal from office, presumably without the parliamentary power to actually make it happen. So you get to be corrupt as you want, and when it's found out and nothing happens, the other guys take the blame!

> You can't arrest someone on account of them being an idiot.

No but you can sure fire them, in the private sector at least.

The 21 km/h above the speed limit would probably not make the auto industry very happy. What good is a Porsche if one needs to drive slowly?

Yes. Driving on the autobahn without speed limit is our 2nd amendment.

> but in the whole EU commission leadership it would be hard to find someone without corruption scandal, accusation or conviction.

that seems an exaggeration, off the top of my head Gentiloni[0] (economics) has not been involved in any corruption scandal or accusation that I know of, nor was Timmermans[1] (VP).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_Gentiloni [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frans_Timmermans

Yes, but did they got to jail or have their earnings confiscated? Losing your job is not much of a deterrent when you've filled your pockets with bribes you get to keep and have a nice pension waiting for you while being put on the payroll as an external consultant to the $BIG_CORP you helped during your rule.

In order for any of that to happen you'd have to be convicted of a crime first.

This would involve stripping immunity first, which doesn't happen all that often and involves approval from the parliament.

Naturally, this is a partisan issue and members of the ruling parties would obviously vote against it, making it very difficult to achieve in practise.

This is common practise in most democratic countries, though and isn't unique to Germany at all.

But that still means that the OP was mostly right: these people are untouchable, so they can steal with impunity.

It doesn't mean that these politicians are untouchable.

If a politician is being caught stealing (e.g. embezzlement), criminal charges W I L L be put forward and immunity will be stripped from them.

The problem here is that unethical behaviour and gross incompetence simply aren't criminal offences.

Are they to be tolerated? No! But that's a question of changing laws and legislation accordingly, not one of being "untouchable" - because even politicians aren't and that's the point.

There's a difference between conflict of interests/unethical behaviour/incompetence and criminal actions.

The consequence of scandals like this should be a call for tighter laws, increased responsibility of all involved parties and better financial supervision in both politics and private enterprise.

Simply getting out the pitchforks, shouting that all politicians are corrupt criminals and demanding heads to roll doesn't change anything and isn't constructive.

Corruption is different from gross incompetence and unethical behavior.

You're still missing the point completely - corruption is a crime. The problem is that pretty much nothing these politicians do is actually illegal and thus doesn't constitute a crime in the first place.

This is why legislation and regulations need to change, because that's way easier than trying to change people.

If you don't like the rules of the game, demand to change the rules instead of shouting "You're all cheaters!" and stop there. That's just cheap and not helpful at all.

I generally agree with your point, but I disagree that legislation and regulations are the problem. Once you reach high level politics, the fact is that anything but utterly blatant criminal behavior will be a political issue.

The solution is that politicians need to be held to a much higher standard than the letter of the law, by their voters. It boggles my mind how many politicians have such obvious conflicts of interest that manage to retain approval of their constituents.

> I disagree that legislation and regulations are the problem

Feel free to disagree with that. I stand by my point on account of the lack of transparency (e.g. no obligation to make ancillary income public) and the legality of the "Revolving Door"-effect.

Government officials in Germany are free to leave office for private enterprise with no restrictions. Public officers have to report lobbying jobs to their former office for 5 years, but the worst that can happen if they don't is loosing their pension.

The latter is not much of a problem, though, if the new employer just pays well enough...

This leads to CFOs of DAX companies becoming government officials in the ministry of finance; public officers serving in the ministry for radiation protection who dealt with interim storage facilities to leave office for (nuclear-) energy companies, and so on.

Holding politicians to higher standards than the law is delusional. Politicians are humans, too. None of them are Jesus Christ incarnate and none of them should be either, because in a democracy they should represent The People, not some Utopian ideal.

> It boggles my mind how many politicians have such obvious conflicts of interest that manage to retain approval of their constituents.

That's because in Germany, nobody knows that there even is a conflict of interests, because politicians aren't obligated to make additional income public.

A reasonable first step would be to make that mandatory (you don't even have to disclose exact sums of money, but it helps knowing that your representative has a paid seat in some board of directors on the side).

You just need to be slightly less corrupted than other politicians

> The problem is that pretty much nothing these politicians do is actually illegal and thus doesn't constitute a crime in the first place.

That is an assumption on your part. In the absence of thorough investigations that would condemn or exonerate them, it is difficult to say. Of course, it would be very twisted to say that the lack of investigations is proof of real corruption. Still, it should also not be taken as prrof of no corruption.

Guttenberg had to resign because his doctoral thesis was full of plagiarism. Even the introduction was plagiarized - but with small changes that made it clear that an attempt had been made to hide the plagiarism.

Guttenberg's public image rested on the idea that he was a morally upright, well composed, competent businessman, along with his noble lineage and family castle. The revelations about his thesis destroyed his credibility.

This is rather different from financial corruption of the sort hinted at in this article.

At least he resigned when he was caught.

Francisca Giffey, the Family Minister, never resigned when her doctor thesis was found plagiarized.

Also von der Leyen, former German Defense Minister and current European Commission leader didn't resign when she was found that she falsified her official CV.

Guttenberg tried to hold onto his position. He at first rejected the accusations, even though they had already been extremely well documented:

> Ich bin gerne bereit zu prüfen, ob bei über 1200 Fußnoten und 475 Seiten vereinzelt Fußnoten nicht oder nicht korrekt gesetzt sein sollten und würde dies bei einer Neuauflage berücksichtigen

> I am perfectly willing to check whether in any of the over 1200 footnotes and 475 pages individual footnotes were not - or not correctly - inserted, and to correct this in a new edition.

Guttenberg kept to this position for a week, while Angela Merkel and most of the government supported him.

In the end, though, the extensive plagiarism (93% of the pages have at least one known instance of plagiarism) in his dissertation was so well documented that it was impossible to deny, and his statements about possibly having made a few mistakes here and there also looked more and more like outright lies. Nobody plagiarizes to that extent by mistake.

" or a contract to friend's friend's construction company" Is absolutely corruption.

Years ago I did a high level IR/HR course at BT where this sort of low level corruption was one of the most common types of serious misconduct.

Of course getting investigated by BT Security is not a happy fun experience.

Yeah, Guttenberg and Von der Leyen are definitely on my "bad people"-list.

Guttenberg was even the main candidate to direct some sort of "Internet security/ethics" department (don't remember anymore exactly what it was)? What kind of joke is that?

Von der Leyen was involved in the story about spending a lot of $ for external contracting companies & other stuff, then she got "promoted" to the EU-level => another joke, for me.

Damn I knew EU was a corrupt institution but didn't know they were so brazen to openly embrace such an individual as Mrs Leyen

You are technically not wrong. I mean Hans-Georg Maassen, head of BfV (spy agency), did lose his job. Not after sharing secret information with neo nazis, that wasnt enough. He doubled down by calling fake news at a video showing neo nazis chasing/beating immigrants. Had to leave his BfV presidency ... for a higher paying position at the interior ministry ;-) aka promotion.

That is not what happened at all.

That's true and you are getting downvoted incorrectly. At first the interior minister wanted to move him to another equally well-paid position, but due to political backlash and also Maasen insisting there is a "radical left cabal" against him inside the government was retired early, which is still very much a golden parachute, but also the intended way for the government to remove political officials from office.

Retired to join law firm he was fighting while heading BfV. Clearly no conflict of interest there.

https://www.dw.com/en/german-ex-spy-chief-maassen-to-join-la...

I hope the revolving door didnt hit him in the ass.

How so?

politics is verboten here

Funny thing about Gutenberg is that he was also lobbying the german government in favor of Wirecard. https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/karl-theodor-zu-g...

Not just that, Guttenberg was also a key figure in the "Augustus Intelligence" corruption scandal of Philipp Amthor.

Both, he is quite your guy for that. Kind of the lobbying equivalent of SoftBank, as soon as he's involved, probability of things being fishy increased significantly.

> Christian Wulff (Former German President), Guttenberg (former Defence Minister)

None of these two served any prison sentences. Wulff was acquitted after he refused to pay 20k € to make it instantly go away and even had damages paid.

Guttenberg was caught plagiarizing for his doctoral dissertation, which is a rather common thing among German politicans. As a consequence he lost some public clout, but instead wrote a book for even more publicity, afaik right now he's doing some work for Springer in the US, biding his time for a another comeback in German politics.

Meanwhile to this day even Kohl's donation scandal, hasn't seen any proper investigation, nor the Amigo-scandal, NSU-scandal, nor the countless others, particularly on a local state level.

Heck, just look at people like Mehdorn and projects like the BER construction site: He, being such a highly renowned and well paid manager, was supposed to fix that mess. Nothing was fixed, the whole thing is still a massive mess, political consequences for anybody actually responsible? Pretty much zero.

The thing is: We Germans are very good about keeping up appearances, as a result of that inconvenient truths and topics often fall by the wayside.

Losing your job just doesn't even register as an actual consequence when it comes to high level corruption though. Like maybe we should take their lollipops too? No TV before dinner?

The big corruption study that comes out each year is actually a corruption perceptions list. So basically how good is your PR.

I don't disagree that the investment in copper was the wrong decision, but according to that article the minister actually sold his shares to Nixdorf (now Siemens?) immediately before becoming a minister. So I'm not quite sure if this is actually a case of corruption or just a case of being too conservative and incompetent (which is also quite widespread in politics).

He sold his shares hours(!) before being signed on as minister and he sold them to the company that benefited the most from the copper cabling that he pushed for.

How you can mistake this obvious corruption for incompetence is beyond me.

> He sold his shares hours(!) before being signed on as minister

This is normal procedure. There is a rather short timeframe between appointment and becoming a minister. Of course did he sold it only after he know it would be a problem.

> How you can mistake this obvious corruption for incompetence is beyond me.

He had no benefits personally, so it's not corruption.

This is just a nice story you tell the kids to give them a scapegoat, ignoring the historical context. This happend 1982, when Internet did not even exist yet. And fiber at the time wasn't really great as today. Copper probably was indeed the better solution, consicdering that survived the decades, where fiber from that time has already become useless long ago.

> Copper probably was indeed the better solution, consicdering that survived the decades, where fiber from that time has already become useless long ago.

Politics aside, isn't that the problem? Copper survived so it didn't need to be replaced. Fiber would have been replaced with newer one because otherwise it would not work at all. People put up with slow Internet, but they wouldn't have put up with no Internet.

So... if he hadn't pushed for copper and instead did the 'better for society' fiber solution, the company wouldn't have been worth nearly as much, possibly much less.

And those stock sales would have been much less profitable.

Not direct cash bribe but definitely far more motivated than just incompetence.

I don't get it. Once he sold the shares he had no further interest in their value. Nothing that happened once he became a minister could have affected his profits from the sale of his stocks. Why are you saying "those stock sales would have been much less profitable"?!

Legally, that's why he had to sell the stocks, which is a reasonable requirement.

OTOH, it doesn't preclude a mutually beneficial understanding, which the exchange points to. Maybe he had a deal, or wanted to keep the good stock between friends.

It’s true, they installed fibre in the 90ies when modernizing the phone network in the East.

A decade later those OPAL installations were replaced again by copper as they could not handle high speed Internet.

Except you're ignoring the part where the copper cable policy he pushed against the advice of his experts made the company he sold his share to obscenely rich.

Is that also not corruption but incompetence?

I don’t see how you could call this corruption, he didn’t benefit from someone else getting rich. Unless there is any evidence that he sold his shares at an inflated price with the understanding that he would pay back the favour while in office or something like that, which I don’t think there is.

It doesn't matter who benefits from this deal, what matters is the country got shit infrastructure against the advice of his experts and the taxpayers paid for it.

Since he signed off on this, it's on him to be investigated.

That's what corruption is.

Of course, if you want, you can cover it up in red tape and make it look like incompetence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption

First sentence:

> Corruption is a form of dishonesty or criminal offense undertaken by a person or organization entrusted with a position of authority, to acquire illicit benefit or abuse power for one's private gain

That's what corruption is.

This still lacks the information of his personal benefit. It's just no corruption until you have a benefit from it.

And experts are also no argument, as there are always experts saying this and that which you can call on later for eny kind of complain.

Neither you nor me are informend enough to say whether it was corruption, biasment, incompetence or something else. We don't even know whether it was good or bad for history. 30-40 years are a long time for technology and infrastructure.

This is what I question about Hanlon's razor, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity/incompetence."

In practice, when such "incompetence" involves millions (of Euro, dollars, etc.) - and those involved stand to gain from it - we ought to scrutinize it as a possible symptom of "malicious competence".

For me, "incompetence" sounds like an excuse or smokescreen, when there are those who profited from it. After all, numerous real-life cases suggest that corruption is endemic, if not inherent, in our institutions of politics, business, and public decision-making process.

The purpose of the Hanlon saying is to make people feel good about the world they live in.

Please explain how this is “obvious corruption”.

He personally benefited by the increased share price of the company, which would have been vastly less if the policy choice had gone with fiber, which is the obvious choice for an infrastructure _upgrade_.

Personal financial gain by abuse of power.

How did he benefit from the increased share price? He sold his shares before he came to power.

FTC and VDSL Copper from the CAB to the Home is not a "Bad" decision.

For quite a while early on in the internets history we are talking 1990's the German Telcos still wanted to use IDSN

Germany did quite a lot of ISDN over fibre to the home in the 1990s, most of the recabling in the east after reunufication was done that way.

However, they made the mistake of burying active components along with the fibre strands that only spoke ISDN. And of course no tubes. For upgrades they ripped it out again and built copper when DSL was en vogue... If they hadn't fucked up this badly, probably due to corruption, Germany would have had 20% broadband fibre coverage instantly 20 years ago

Ah I see thank you I recall years ago when I did work on the international side my boss making a comment about ISDN and Germany and I now see the issue they backed themselves into.

The UK could have had much better fibre if back in the 90's Mrs Thatcher's government had given BT a 20 year payback and allowed BT to implement its Fibre plans.

The first paragraph is exactly what happened in Australia too. I will never forgive anyone in the Liberal party (the conservative one) for the treasonous act of deliberately destroying the NBN.

It set every industry in the country back decades. Medicine, education, everything. It makes my blood boil. I have to avoid thinking or reading about it at this point.

Internet in Ukraine and Belarus was not built in centralized manner, but quite naturally, and in competitive environment. Reasonably most places ended up with fiber where it was possible. Monopolist telecoms were not prepared and were overpowered by enthusiasts overcoming communication obstacles in any imaginable way, including legal quirks and vacuum at that time.

Nothing good can be expected when central gotv starts to "innovate".

Ha! "being suicided" I like what you did there.

> Sure, it's not like Russia or the CCP and you're not in danger of being suicided if you uncover some high level dirt but nobody really ever gets punished when obvious corruption gets proven so I have no idea how they always manage to looks so good in the corruption statistics.

That's the thing. The statistics are not untouched either. It's a rather pervasive thing, this corruption.

I also agree with the sentiment, that they do not really get punished. When have I read the last time, that some politician with hundreds of thousands of € of unregistered side-income is put in jail, like any merely normal citizen would for such a hefty sum? Oh wait, never.

Just to add to your list: Read into the history of the Deutsche Bank and their current business proceedings. It's literally obscene the list of controversies that has spun out of their practices, and steadily keeps on going.

Most corruption stats that I have seen are based on perception of corruption. If people perceive it as dodgy but legal, or if people view it as the odd bad egg, then it won't affect perceptions, no matter how rife it is. If it doesn't affect perceptions, it doesn't affect measures.

There’s a really great documentary about how criminals used the disconnect between perception of corruption and actual corruption in Vatican City to launder money for decades. (And still do, really.) The name of the movie escapes me but I’m commenting in hopes that someone here will know.

A few keyword searches found:

- Vatican Inc. - https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/vatican-inc/

- Holy Money - Vatican City Corruption

> Sure, it's not like Russia or the CCP and you're not in danger of being suicided if you uncover some high level dirt

Gustl Mollath [0] would probably disagree with that notion, just like the death of Jürgen Möllemann [1] left more questions unanswered than a proper investigation of him would very likely have answered. Similar situation with Wolfgang Hüllen during the CDU donations scandal.

Similarly the NSU process saw a lot of witnesses die under rather weird circumstances [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustl_Mollath

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_M%C3%B6llemann

[2]https://www1.wdr.de/fernsehen/aktuelle-stunde/startseite/nsu...

Mollath wasn’t killed: he was falsely imprisoned and received EUR 670k compensation for that. Mölleman‘s death was suicide (the accomplished parachuter jumped out of a plane less than half an hour after his parliamentary immunity was revoked, opened the main chute, cut it, and didn’t open the reserve, (and the automatic reserve deployment was disabled)).

Seriously, it’s not Russia.

> Mollath wasn’t killed: he was falsely imprisoned

He wasn't imprisoned, they sent him to the asylum for 8 years because claiming German banks could do criminal things is just such crazy of a thing to do.

Which has quite some similarities to what happened to Hessian tax investigators [0] that were too successful for their own good: Using psychiatric assessments to discredit people who blow the whistle on corruption.

In that context it's quite cynical how nearly every high-profile suicide in Russia is framed as some kind of political hit-job ordered straight by the government, while in other countries people are looking for any reason to deny the existence of foul play.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steuerfahnder-Aff%C3%A4re

The fact that no one has resigned or been fired from the Regulator.

The head of the regulator should have resigned weeks ago.

> looks so good in the corruption statistics

The main corruption measurement I know of is the CPI: Corruption Perception Index. It doesn't measure how much corruption there is in any given country, it only measures how much visible corruption there is. I'm sure there are other gauges but that's the one that gets reported and made comparisons on.

For a long time Finland tended to be either the top dog on that list, or at least hold firmly its hold in the top-3. As a Finn, I always found that rather depressing, for a simple reason. The top spot on the CPI list tells nothing about how well things are in a country. It merely tells how shitty they are even for the runner-up.

Mindlessly ambitious networks of people who care about themselves more than anything else exist in all countries. Google distribution of personality types within a population. They are weirdly similar across cultures.

Where resources are low and there is not enough to go around for the most ambitious and driven, there "punishment" for wasting each others time and resources is more extreme.

If Facebook or Google or Twitter, one day in the future is sophisticated enough to label the most "corrupt"/"corruptible" individuals in a population based on all their data how would you "punish" all of them if it is 30% the population?

The same way you punish other crimes.

Corruption is crime, not vaguely acceptable opportunism. It has very direct negative social, political, and economic consequences. The fact that someone is robbing people using a company and/or a political organisation instead of guns and knives isn't an excuse - especially not when the sums involved can be so large.

> so I have no idea how they always manage to looks so good in the corruption statistics.

It's all about definition of corruption isn't it?

In European politics and press we describe "outright deliberate corruption" with innocent deceiving descriptions such as "lobbying" and "failed government IT projects".

Is Northern Europe less corrupt than the South? Or is the Northern corruption just more institutionalized (aka: more competent at corruption)? I wouldn't know where to start to get an answer to that.

Is it corruption if the public never finds out?

This generalizes to damn near every government (or any big powerful organization to some extent as well) ever. The only difference is that more money enables some governments to abstract it away and reduce the visibility of it better than others.

BS. My area had fibre since the 80s or 90s and that's why we had to have dial-up until early 2000s. Early DSL only worked through copper.

The article referenced in your article about that is from 1983. [1] I don't think fibre optics technology was that established at the time. Helmut Kohl's chancellorship was from 1982-1998. During that time, after the German reunion there were large scale investments into an upgrade of the Eastern German infrastructure including fibre glass deployment in the new German Länder. Therefore for a long time this area had some of the most modern telecommunication infrastructure world-wide - and for that matter probably also highway infrastructure.

[1] https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-14018341.html

This doesn’t matter as what you are stating is false assumption. Deutsche Bundespost built a first fibre optics link in 1978[0]. In 1981 they „ruled“ to invest in fibre tech over the next 30 years. Guess who canceled that. You can also find more in-depth Info and should definitely read [1]. Also the Russians got to Kohl in 1986/1987 and offered him the reunification. But he refused in fear to loose the Bundestagswahl of 1987. This guy was one the ridiculous politicians we ever saw. Heck.. the bribe money the CDU owned that was stored in Switzerland even has ties to gold the Nazis stole from the Jews. Never trust anything the CDU does. Never trust anyone of the high ranking politicians. Always ask yourself: Qui Bono? [0] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lichtwellenleiter [1] https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Missing-Link-Der-Kam...

I am an expat living in Germany. I laugh out loud at such amazing statements such as yours. Whatever Germany's shortcomings, its heavy history, its complicated laws and customs... I would still take this over any other Western country.

Nobody is saying Germany is a horrible place, but pointing out problems is the only way one can fix them.

That's why "complaining on a high level" is a rather German thing.

At the past 38C3 congress there was also an interesting talk about how the main political parties influence the German public broadcasters.

No surprise there is so little critical reporting, despite the 9 billion euros yearly budget.

> If you're on the DAX or a politician, you're untouchable in Germany and lots of people inside and outside of Germany have no idea of how insanely corrupt the German government and their corporate buddies are.

Trust me, we know.

I speak for central/eastern Europe: where Deutsche Telekom has a big market share you can bet they formed a cartel and the prices for phones are higher than in western Europe.

(edit) Also: basically nothing of relevance happened in Europe after Volkswagen diesel scandal... I wonder why.

> Sure, it's not like Russia or the CCP

You really lost me there. The gap is civilizational. Russia and CCP are systemically corrupt, those countries must collapse for there to be a chance to uproot that disease. Pretending like it’s even meaningful comparing them to Germany on linear scale just creates suspicion in my mind that you’re part of somebody’s propaganda machine.

Replace the DAX with Nasdaq and America is basically the same. We just have different names for it like lobbying.

> lots of people inside and outside of Germany have no idea of how insanely corrupt the German government and their corporate buddies are

Compared to what? The ideal 100% angles? Because compared to reality and the rest of the world Germany sits very well in that regard.

> Sure, it's not like Russia or the CCP and you're not in danger of being suicided if you uncover some high level dirt

Don't they lock people up in mental hospitals for that, though? That's classic USSR tactics.

This is just conventional lobbying. It's pretty bad when the lobbyists come from a company with a monopoly like an ISP but every other company is still at risk of being boycotted.

What about Deutsche Bank? The absolute gold standard in international money laundering.

Swiss, US and UK Banks (HSBC) are not far behind though. But agreed, Deutsche aims to be participant in any possible scandal.

the concept of strong inner connections between top politicians and top businesses applies for almost every country regardless of the political system. so corruption in that sense is everywhere in every layer of society.

May I ask why you have picked Ukraine and Belarus as the basis for comparison?

Faster internet than Germany, while being far behind Germany by most standard socio-economic metrics.

It's funny, because we all know the German stereotype of efficiency etc.

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