Germany has become the full supplier of an energy supplier, who bet in vain on the continuation of the Gazprom monopoly. We are talking about the bursting Düsseldorf colossus Uniper, a property of the Finnish state-owned company Fortum, for which we citizens pay twice.
Uniper, which buys gas at high cost because the cheap Putin gas is no longer flowing, is a bottomless pit. For such cases, the market economy actually has insolvency under self-administration ready.
The joke of the gas story is that not only the zombie company Uniper enjoys the public billions – but also companies that don’t need it at all unabashedly access it. According to our research, only a few of the twelve corporations that are being flooded with 34 billion euros are dependent on state alimony. You just take it with you, a “Matthew effect”: “For whoever has it will be given to have plenty; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him.”
VNG, for example, appears from the EnBW group, whose boss Frank Mastiaux recently announced that his company’s risk was “not small, but not existential either”. According to the “Frankfurter Allgemeine”, EnBW is starting today the profitable sale of 49.9 percent of its electricity network operator Transnet BW, in which the financial giant Blackrock and the KfW bank are interested.
From abroad reporting as needy: OMV (Austria), Axpo (Switzerland) and Vitol (Netherlands-Switzerland), all of which have benefited from record prices for oil, gas and electricity. The whole insanity of the large watering can policy becomes visible when, of all people, the commodities trader Gunvor, listed in the oligarch paradise Nicosia, wants to empty the German accounts: he sells oil and gas from Rosneft and Gazprom outside of Russia. Pulling the strings is close Putin amigo Gennady Timchenkowhich is on the UK sanctions list.
So something is going terribly wrong here, and the main person responsible is the Green Economics Minister Robert Habeck, who may have the wrong consultants. One piece of advice would be to have a longer chat with his party friend Ramona Pop, the chairman of the Federal Association of Consumer Organizations. She points out that the federal government wants to prevent insolvencies, but that the protection of profits at the expense of consumers should be ruled out. That’s why, according to Pop, it is imperative “that all companies that want to benefit from the levy despite bubbling profits are not given any support.”
But there is still Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who quickly found an answer to the no from Brussels to the requested waiver of value added tax in connection with the new gas surcharge: he simply reduced the value added tax on gas in general by March 2024 from the previous 19 percent to seven percent. The Social Democrat prevents double-digit inflation rates and gas bills from rising too much, but favors owners of large houses who have to pay less for heating. There are generally no incentives to save energy: bulling is allowed. Where the watering can was used for the allocation, a complete water sprinkler system now cares for the landscape. After the tank discount comes the gas discount.
No wonder most economists have doubts. A small selection?
Stefan Kooths, Vice President of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy: “This decision dilutes an essential desired purpose of the gas surcharge: to save gas. In order to cushion social hardship, a better solution would be to levy the full amount of VAT and to direct the income to those who are in existential need as a result of the rising costs.”
Marcel Fratzscher, President of the German Institute for Economic Research: “An expensive and not accurate instrument that relieves people with low incomes far too little.”
Jens Südekum from the Institute for Competition Economics at the University of Düsseldorf: “Both from an incentive and a distribution perspective, the tax cut is a step in the wrong direction.”
Let’s stay with Olaf Scholz for a moment. It may be that today before the committee of inquiry in Hamburg on the tax scandal surrounding Cum-Ex, the local Warburg Bank and its owner Christian Olearius hear sentences from him how: “I can’t remember” or “I don’t know. I don’t know anything about that.” From the 100 questions that the Hanseatic parliamentarians could ask the former mayor, we have selected the eight best. I name four of them here.
- Who decided that MM Warburg didn’t have to pay taxes back in 2016?
- Why could Scholz not remember meetings with Olearius until they were proven?
- How does Scholz feel about Olearius’ donations to the Hamburg SPD?
- Why did Scholz take care of the Olearius case, but not his own Landesbank, which, thanks to Cum-Ex, also avoided the annoying tax payments to a large extent?
Let’s end Waterkantgate and the “Story of O” with Shakespeare: “A small fire is easily ignited, which – only tolerated – rivers can no longer extinguish.” On Olearius’ 70th birthday in May 2012, keynote speaker Scholz quoted the English language master. The exploitation of the public coffers via Cum-Ex was still going to the fullest.
We have packed another big problem that citizens are currently having with the state into a highly informative weekend cover story: the “property tax madness”. I keep hearing from friends with their own real estate how they suffer from the electronic recalculation of taxes, under hardly understandable rules that differ from federal state to federal state and that mean an immense additional bureaucratic effort.
There is a lot to come for owners: In addition to complicated data collection, the costs will rise significantly in the course of the property tax reform.
Digitalization? Sort of just one word. The tax offices are provided with data on dates, on living space, the attic, steps on the stairs or orchards in the garden, a bundle for 36 million cases. And at the end? Can it be that you pay ten times as much as before. The great Ralf Dahrendorf was right: “We need bureaucracy to solve our problems. But once we have it, it prevents us from doing what we need it for.”
My cultural tip for the weekend is the first of ten books on our shortlist for the German Business Book Prize 2022. At the end you will be able to vote on who you think deserves the audience award. Massimo Bognanni starts with “Under the eyes of the state – the biggest tax robbery in the history of the Federal Republic” (dtv). Yes, it’s about Cum-Ex again (see Scholz, Olaf), and the great merit of the author is not only to write down the story of brazen tax evasion, but also to name the many stations at which the affair could have been stopped.
And then there is Robert Ketterer, 53, Germany’s top-selling art auctioneer, who took over the family business from his father in 1997. Whoever is interested in modern art in the guild of the well-heeled, managers, entrepreneurs, lawyers and TV presenters cannot ignore Ketterer Kunst. In a large portrait of the unknown, we describe his way of working, his company network, his market expectations. “Collectors only pay high prices for top works,” says the auctioneer, “but being too pushy in the fight for the goods is not well received by many customers.” If necessary, he travels to the appointment in his own plane and starts one of his acquisition talks like this: “Do you actually know what that’s worth now?”
The man from Munich also has a favorite saying, by Aldous Huxley: “People owe progress to the dissatisfied.”
I wish you a relaxed, art-loving weekend and you may be satisfied too. For the dissatisfaction, the next week is there.
It greets you cordially
Her
Hans Jürgen Jakobs
Senior editor