The Federal Ministry of Transport sees no conflict of interest in the case of a department head’s potential personal relationships when allocating funding. There is currently no evidence that a department head has influenced the allocation of public funds, a ministry spokesman said on Monday in Berlin. However, as is generally the case with compliance allegations, all leads are followed up. Politicians from the traffic light coalition also called on the ministry to be transparent.
The “Handelsblatt” had reported on references to private contacts in the allocation of funding in the millions in the Ministry of Transport. According to the report, it is about alleged friendships between the head of the policy department and the chairman of a hydrogen association and a Bavarian entrepreneur. According to research by the “Handelsblatt”, the association and the entrepreneur’s companies received a total of around 28 million euros from the “National Innovation Program for Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technology”. The program is the responsibility of the department in the ministry.
The ministry spokesman said that an external project sponsor had been entrusted with the decisions on the selection of the projects for the funding programs. The department head was not part of “decision chains”.
The Greens transport politician Stefan Gelbhaar said: “In such a case, the ministry must create transparency about what happened when. The allocation practice of each ministry must be clearly comprehensible, so that there can be no doubt about the clean use of tax funds.” SPD faction deputy Detlef Müller had already told the “Handelsblatt” that private and official matters had to be strictly separated. The Left Party Deputy Lorenz Gösta Beutin had said that a relentless clarification was needed as to whether nepotism had played a decisive role in the allocation of funds from the national hydrogen program.
