Water shortage in the Rhine drives fear – Morning Briefing

The water level in Emmerich is lower than ever. The only hope is the weather itself: Yesterday, high “Oscar” said goodbye, the first storms are forecast for today, which could be followed by several this week. And, who knows: maybe in a few days we will no longer be complaining about rivulets, but flash floods and high water like in the Ahr Valley in summer 2021.

Today the governments in Berlin and Warsaw are eagerly awaiting the latest laboratory results on fish kills in the Oder. Was it too much salt? Despite all the denials, were there any toxic substances? Federal Environment Minister Steffi Lemke (Greens) speaks of a “bad environmental catastrophe” (one of damn many) and tries to improve cooperation between the German authorities and the Polish ones.

Poland’s government had admitted that important information about the death of the fish was not passed on within the country. That is why Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki dismissed the heads of the water authority and the environmental authority: “I was definitely informed too late.” Poland offered a reward of more than 200,000 euros for clarification. In the meantime, the people on the Baltic Sea are also concerned.

This Monday it should be clear how high the gas surcharge will be – something between 1.5 and 5 cents per kilowatt hour. This is intended to save 25 million German gas customers the balance sheets of corporations that have to procure expensive substitutes for cheap Russian gas that is no longer available as usual. It is a “Lex Uniper”, tailored to a crumbling colossus that the state is saving 15 billion euros in a first-aid campaign. The fact that moral issues are involved here is made clear by the waiver of two massively earning large companies who do not want to charge their customers a gas surcharge.

• RWE from Essen has earned so well with renewable energies that one can apparently easily do without payments from the gas surcharge – without fundamentally giving up the legal claim completely. CEO Markus Krebber says: “RWE is a financially strong and robust company” – but no oligopolist has yet resisted subsidies at the right time. That’s why he’s so big.
• The British oil multinational Shell sees the situation similarly. A lot of gas had been imported from Russia up to June and many partnership projects with Russian companies had already been maintained in recent years. Shell, too, is earning so much from increased petrol prices that it is commendable that they now refrain from having any additional costs paid for via the gas surcharge.

It is also certain that Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner is doing everything in the EU to prevent Germany from having to levy VAT on the gas surcharge – and thus becoming a crisis evader and inflation driver. The union-affiliated Institute for Macroeconomics and Business Cycle Research is already firing that the inflation rate will rise “to more than ten percent”. FDP boss Lindner on ZDF: “I wrote to Brussels and I’m committed to averting that.”

Just as leading mafiosi were regularly not punished for murder but for tax offences, bosses in dog-normal companies and organizations immediately give up if expense fraud is suspected. That’s how it is now with Patricia Schlesinger, who has already given up the ARD presidency and is to be dismissed without notice by the broadcasting board of the Berlin broadcaster RBB today.

At one of the many salon dinners in their own walls with celebrities and semi-celebrities, all of whom were paid for by the employer and thus by the contributor (i.e. you and me), four people are said to have been listed on the statement – ​​but they were only three were present. Schlesinger, 61, could experience the same disenchantment as ex-Sparda boss Enrico Kahl.

In the end, the Schlesinger case, which is also a felt case, should end up in court. Finally, even Berlin’s Attorney General’s Office intervened after the Prosecutor’s Office had watched the affair for a long time, like onlookers the line-up of publicity-hungry guests in front of the “Borchardt” refreshment station.

The reason for the termination was “the settlement of entertainment costs for an invitation with dinner in Ms. Schlesinger’s private apartment on February 12 to the RBB as business necessary, although this was entirely or at least partially of a purely private nature,” quoted “Bild” from the draft resolution. Two-thirds of the Broadcasting Council must vote in favor of being kicked out. The RBB board of directors must decide whether the outgoing director will keep a severance payment and her pension entitlements.

Big money, big tragedy: The early death of banker Anshu Jain at the age of only 59 does not only affect the financial world. His mentor Edson Mitchell, who had guided the native Indian to Deutsche Bank, died in a plane crash in 2000 at the age of 47.

In Germany’s largest financial institution, Jain had made extremely high capital market profits with risky transactions during the boom in deregulation, which fell on the bank’s feet after the financial crisis and forced 15 billion euros in fines. Thanks to Blackrock shareholder Larry Fink and due to the most sticky intrigues, Jain was co-head of Deutsche Bank from 2012 to 2015 before stress with the regulators also promoted his departure.

The institute would have needed a structurist like ex-Bundesbank President Axel Weber, but got an intellectual, sympathetic player figure who ended up getting a clerical position at the New York financial services provider Cantor Fitzgerald. Jain died of stomach cancer after a long battle. He had already lost the fight for his career.

And then there’s the “witch hunt,” a favorite word of politicians under pressure. The word will be heard frequently from Donald Trump and his aides in the coming days after details of the FBI’s raid on the ex-president’s Mar-a-Lago Florida home became public. Afterwards, the investigators found exactly what they were looking for in the “as-cheesy-as-can-be” palace: a number of documents classified as “secret”, “top secret” or “confidential” that Trump had after his removal from the White House by the voter should not have had more.

And the “New York Times” knows how to report that one of Trump’s legal advisors had assured the authorities in June that he no longer had any secret papers. So the situation is explosive, but for Trump’s followers it’s a “witch hunt”.

It is claimed that the FBI officials probably brought the “evidence” with them themselves in order to “find” it during the search. Before Trump is nominated as the new old Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential election, his campaign friends will have to tell many more lies.

This is not hopeless, as one can gather from the words of the Austrian writer Alfred Polgar: “People believe a lie that they have heard a hundred times more easily than a truth that is completely new to them.”

I wish you a day marked by truths.

It greets you cordially
Her
Hans Jürgen Jakobs
Senior editor