Shortly before the end of the year, the “Mask” investigative committee in the Bavarian state parliament is heading for its climax. Will there be exciting statements?
Munich (dpa / lby) – Almost exactly a year after the mask committee of the Bavarian state parliament was set up, the highlight is coming up there on Friday: the hearing of Prime Minister Markus Söder. The CSU boss is expected to be on the witness stand right at the start of the 45th meeting in the morning from 9 a.m. He’s the last witness called.
Numerous other current or former members of the cabinet had already testified in the committee in the past few weeks. Everyone unanimously rejected criticism of the corona management and at the same time condemned the fact that individual politicians had personally enriched themselves through mask shops during the pandemic.
Like many other witnesses, Söder’s questioning is likely to be about how he was personally involved in arranging mask deals for the state government at the beginning of the pandemic in winter and spring 2020 – and where he may also have been involved in decisions. According to reports, the documents submitted by the state government to the committee of inquiry are “very poor” in this regard.
It is well known that Söder has repeatedly involved himself in the procurement of masks and was happy to receive them personally at the airport, for example. The documents also contain a text message from Söder to the former Secretary of State for the Interior, Gerhard Eck, in which he demanded that an offer brokered by the former Federal Minister of Transport, Andreas Scheuer, be purchased, even though it had passed a technical examination in the Ministry of Health.
The case in which Söder’s wife’s company had made a mask offer to the Free State should also be discussed again. In the end, however, it was not realized.
A total of 150 witnesses have been heard in the investigative committee in 44 meetings so far. The pure session time amounts to 240 hours. 3,400 digitized files with a volume of over two million sheets and a data size of 120 gigabytes were evaluated and processed. The protocol already comprises more than 4600 pages.
“The intensive work of the committee of inquiry was important and worthwhile. The moral misconduct of the cases known to the committee of inquiry was completely cleared up,” said the chairman of the committee, ex-Justice Minister Winfried Bausback (CSU). “The blanket suspicion of everyone who has managed to cope with this pandemic in the best possible way has been clearly refuted.” The perfidious attempt by the opposition to place the dedicated work of MPs for Bavaria or their constituency under general suspicion of corruption has clearly failed.
For co-chairman Florian Siekmann (Greens), the conclusion is different: “Markus Söder was happy to present himself as a pioneer during the pandemic. In the central task of mask procurement, however, he relied on pushing individual political deals instead of robust procurement structures .” For the quick photo on the tarmac in front of the masked plane, he thoughtlessly accepted that defective goods would be bought. “It is becoming increasingly clear: Söder’s pandemic management was more appearance than reality,” said Siekmann.
The aim of the committee set up by the state parliament in December 2021 at the urging of the SPD, Greens and FDP was and is in particular to clarify mask deals by the state government in the corona pandemic as well as possible involvement of politicians and sometimes high commission payments to MPs – with the commissions from participating companies.
At the center of the mask affair are the long-standing CSU MPs Alfred Sauter and Georg Nüßlein, who received lavish commissions at the beginning of the corona pandemic for arranging mask shops. From a legal point of view, the Federal Court of Justice did not see the offense of bribery as fulfilled – because the deputies would have had to act in parliament themselves. Sauter and Nüßlein always emphasized that they acted as lawyers in their roles. Nevertheless, CSU top politicians have described the actions of the two former colleagues as morally reprehensible.
