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Federal Transport Minister Volker Wissing (FDP) at a hydrogen filling station: Questionable funding from his department
Photo:
Annette Riedl / picture alliance
The Federal Ministry of Transport is no longer approving funds for hydrogen funding for the time being. A corresponding internal letter from State Secretary Stefan Schnorr is available to SPIEGEL. It is said that no contracts on this topic will be entered into until further notice. “Any notifications of changes to ongoing funding projects also require approval from the state secretary level,” Schnorr also writes.
In the affair surrounding the questionable role of a department head in the allocation of funding, the State Secretary himself had recently come under increasing pressure. Documents available to SPIEGEL recently suggested that the internal audit department, which was subordinate to Schnorr, had apparently overlooked important things and therefore had not correctly informed the public about the extent of the scandal. Schnorr claimed several times that he and the internal audit department were not aware of the compromising emails for a long time. In fact, these were sent by the ministry on November 1st after a request from the portal fragdenstaat.de - and therefore over a month before the corresponding audit report was completed.
The affair was triggered by reports from “Handelsblatt”, later also SPIEGEL, Lobby Control and other media, according to which the head of the hydrogen department, Klaus Bonhoff, had funded hydrogen projects with a sum of around 1.5 million euros in 2021. The decisive factor could have been a personal closeness: Bonhoff is friends with Werner Diwald from the German Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Association. They both know each other well, they are on first name terms and have already been on vacation together.
The ministry then initiated an internal investigation under the leadership of Schnorr, the results of which initially did not confirm the suspicion of nepotism at the end of 2023. As a result of a SPIEGEL report about confidential emails between Diwald and Bonhoff, he was finally relieved of his duties on Thursday.
In the past few days, a second suspected case has also become known: The Bavarian entrepreneur Tobias Brunner and his partner and business partner Christiane Heyer also maintained an astonishing closeness to Bonhoff. The Ministry of Transport supported both of them with the construction of a hydrogen factory with over 72 million euros.
gt/fin/sol