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The U committee on car tolls is nearing its climax. When did you want who wanted the toll contract signed? The consortium operators, who should collect the money, are a heavy burden on Minister Scheuer. Did you lie to the Bundestag?
“Is Scheuer still coming or not?” It is the question that is being discussed in the hallway in front of the large conference room. The investigation committee on the car toll disaster had started its meeting here in the morning. If Federal Transportation Minister Andreas Scheuer testifies before the committee late in the evening, as announced, then it will be an extremely uncomfortable questioning situation for the man from CSU. You have to fight for your credibility, and that is challenged by the testimony of three witnesses. Furthermore, the statement that Scheuer attempted to intimidate his former business partners when it was clear that the gigantic project had failed puts pressure on the CSU politician.
The car toll explosion could cost Germany 500 million euros. The committee began its work earlier in the year by asking how much Scheuer is to blame for this debacle and whether the adjudication procedure was correct. In the meantime, however, the focus is elsewhere: the opposition in particular is trying to shed light on what methods Scheuer used to get his head out of the loop at the time the project failed.
The 560 million euro question
“It was a threat,” Klaus-Peter Schulenberg, CEO of ticket distributor CTS Eventim, said in the afternoon when asked how he understood Scheuer’s request. Scheuer had hoped that Schulenberg and his associates would support the minister’s presentation. This says it would have been impossible to postpone the multi-million dollar auto toll contract. According to Schulenberg, Scheuer asked the operators to say that they wanted to sign the toll contract starting in 2018 and thus before a ruling by the European Union Court of Justice (ECJ) on the legality of the car toll.
If the Ministry of Transport and the Kapsch Eventim consortium had not concluded the contract for the car toll on December 30, 2018, but rather postponed the conclusion until after the verdict had been delivered, this would have saved the federal government from claiming compensation of 560 million euros. Kapsch Eventim now requires this amount due to lost revenue.
Because when the Court of Justice finally stopped the car toll in June 2019, the ministry terminated the contract a day later. At this time, Kapsch Eventim had already been working hard for six months, since the contract was signed, to start collecting the toll in fall 2020, just as Scheuer wanted.
Scheuer said he had no choice
How could the ministry conclude a two billion dollar contract for the car toll when it wasn’t even clear that the project would be classified as EU law? Because at the time of signing the contract, the verdict of the judges was still pending. After the judge’s verdict, Scheuer publicly presented the case as if he had no choice but to sign it ahead of time.
But Schulenberg and his associates contradict this representation. They even want to have offered the minister an extra to postpone the signing of the contract. The corresponding discussion took place at the Transport Ministry at the end of November 2018. But “the minister resolutely refused to wait until after the ECJ ruling before signing the contract,” Schulenberg told the committee.
His business partner Georg Kapsch later confirmed this in his survey. He also had a possible explanation ready: “If you start the system in October 2020, you cannot sign in June 2019,” he says. A postponement was out of the question for Scheuer. In the opinion of both directors, the minister was absolutely certain that the toll would have to start in the autumn of 2020 and not in the 2021 election year.
Due to the early conclusion of the contract, Scheuer was also questioned in the Bundestag. He had stated several times that Kapsch Eventim had not made an offer to postpone the signing. If the directors told the committee the truth, Scheuer lied to the Bundestag.
His then secretary of state, Gerhard Schulz, is being questioned before the committee and supports Scheuer’s statement. So ministerial questioning is on the agenda. But what if he actually still testifies at such a late time? The opposition in the committee, in particular, has great doubts about this.
