RWE affair

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The RWE affair concerns payments by the RWE Group to state and federal politicians, which came to light at the end of 2004.

Payments to Hermann-Josef Arentz

First of all, in November 2004 it became known that Hermann-Josef Arentz , then a member of the North Rhine-Westphalian state parliament , chairman of the CDU employee organization CDA and member of the CDU presidium , as a former employee of RWE, would continue to make payments from a subsidiary of the company ( RWE Power ) of 60,000 euros annually as well as free electricity deliveries without consideration. When Arentz stood for re-election to the Presidium at his party's federal party conference in Düsseldorf in December, this attempt failed. Arentz received only 33.8 percent of the vote. On December 8th, Arentz finally resigned from the federal chairmanship of the CDA and declared that in 2005 he no longer wanted to run for a seat in the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia .

Payments to Laurenz Meyer

On December 10, 2004 it was reported that the CDU general secretary Laurenz Meyer was also getting electricity from RWE (which had taken over his former employer VEW in 2000 ), although he had left the company in 1999. A week later, new allegations surfaced that he had received funds from RWE while he was still secretary-general of the CDU . Meyer explained that it was a severance payment that was due in May 2000, since his contract had been suspended for a year at that time. In a statement on December 17, Meyer had described the payment in question as "legally correct", but later had to revoke this representation. In fact, Meyer had already returned to RWE after the CDU defeat in the state elections in North Rhine-Westphalia when the money was finally paid in July 2000. What Meyer had really received the money for, he did not say. In addition to this income, Laurenz Meyer still received his remuneration as Vice President of the State Parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia and thus received three salaries at times.

To avert his resignation, Meyer announced on December 20 that he wanted to donate the amount in question of 81,800 euros to the SOS Children's Villages . First of all, the CDU chairwoman Angela Merkel tried to support her party friend Meyer. Both then had to give in to pressure from the public and internal party critics, so that Meyer announced his resignation from the office of CDU Secretary General on December 22, 2004.

On December 23, the electricity company RWE announced the result of an internal investigation into the payments to Meyer. According to this, 160,000 of 250,000 D-Marks were unjustifiably transferred from VEW to Meyer due to a “communication error”. The company's board of directors and supervisory board later stated that it had been embezzlement by an employee. At the beginning of 2005, Meyer and RWE terminated his employment relationship retrospectively as of December 31, 2004 with a severance payment of 400,000 euros. Meyer paid back the roughly EUR 81,000 severance payment to his former employer, while RWE has announced a donation of EUR 100,000 to SOS Children's Villages. According to Spiegel, Meyer was able to reactivate his last dormant employment contract at RWE; from this he had an annual income of 112,381 euros; he left RWE at the beginning of 2005 with a severance payment.

Appreciation of the affair

With this affair, the lobbying practices of the RWE Group came under general criticism. It became known that at the end of 2004 RWE had around 200 full-time and mainly part-time mandate holders in its own workforce and tried to influence politics in this and similar ways over the decades.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ CDA boss Arentz is said to have collected a lot of money from RWE for doing nothing. In: Welt.de. Retrieved November 28, 2019 .
  2. ^ Meyer affair: CDU and FDP fear voter memos , Der Spiegel of December 23, 2004