CORONA processing: What the MPs want from the mask investigator

The crisis management of the CDU top politician Jens Spahn during the Corona pandemic is again in the focus of the Bundestag. In the budget committee, the special investigator Margaretha Sudhof today faces the questions of the MPs. Sudhof examined the mask procurement under the then health minister Jens Spahn on behalf of his successor Karl Lauterbach (SPD). What else do the Greens and the Left of Sudhof want to know?

In essence, it is about the details of Spahn’s acting at the time. Because today’s Union faction is said to have procured all the usual rules in the spring of 2020 – without more precise determination of the needs, without price negotiations and consequently overpriced. He is said to have ignored warnings of his own civil servants. Ultimately, fewer funds were needed than initially assumed, but legal disputes with suppliers are still open who could be expensive for the federal government.

This is also shown by a report by the Federal Audit Office for the Budget Committee: The follow -up costs for the management of the “overschevation” – it means – would have increased by a further 57 million euros to 517 million euros in 2024. “For the still usable residual stocks of 800 million protective masks in 2024, there is no distribution concept,” says the report of the Auditors to the development of the health budget, which is available to the German Press Agency. First the “Spiegel” reported about it.

Follow -up costs of 45 million euros are provided for 2025. For 2026 and 2027, foreseeable obligations such as warehouse, logistics, annihilation, external advice and legal advice will be expected with expenditure of 67.3 million euros.

Unwitted special report

A question that puts the opposition in the foreground: To what extent was Spahn warned of the risks of a procurement of procurement? After the Ministry of Health had initially blackened parts of the Sudhof report under the current head of department Nina Warken (CDU), the unsuccessful version was recently published.

According to the opposition, footnotes document the warnings of Spahn. Green health expert Janosch Dahmen therefore says that Spahn has systematically lied. His left-wing colleague Ates Gürpinar says that the Union apparently uses all opportunities to cover “Spahn’s personal entanglements”. In this direction you want to follow up again.

Without ordinary procedures

Specifically, in the non-public committee meeting, for example, the shops that the federal government has received with individual companies are likely to take a large area. The Sudhof report, for example, represents the commissioning of a Swiss company as problematic because the federal government is said to have embarked on overhanging at excessive prices. A logistics company from Spahn’s home region is also said to have come into play against objections from the Interior Ministry and without proper procedures, which is said to have been quickly overwhelmed.

Spahn speaks of constructed allegations

Spahn himself referred several times to the sometimes chaotic circumstances not only in his house, the great need for masks, to the emergency situation. “We coped with a century crisis, better than most other countries in the world,” he said to the “star”. Regular bureaucracy was neither sensible nor possible in the first few weeks of pandemic.

At the same time, the Union faction leader assured again that he had not received any money for mask business at the time. He replied to a corresponding question of the “Stern”: “These insinuations of individual Greens are slandered. So far I have only known such a mealed from the AfD.”

Greens health politicians Dahmen had recently said that the unwitted Sudhof report showed that Warken had targeted blackening in several places with the obvious goal of disguising the responsibility of Spahn and other members of the Union, “which made the state and taxpayers prey in the pandemic”.