Politics

Squabbles, too, between the government and the electricity market

While the Federal Minister of the Economy Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) is rejecting demands from the industry for compensation for prioritising safe production capacity, the economy of the industry’s coal- and gas-fired generating stations is calling for help. In the course of the conference on energy held in Berlin, e-on CEO Johannes Teyssen pointed out that conventional, safe power stations are going to be very necessary indeed for many years to come.

According to him "the real interest of today’s management of power stations is to safeguard overcapacity at the expense of the electricity consumer". A healthy market ought to show “real signs of a lack of need” that determine the necessary signals for investment. Groups such as E.on and RWE & Co, have invested vast sums over the last ten years to build new coal- and gas-fired power stations. In this climate of demand for renewable energy, producers are under great pressure because wind and sun are introducing energy on to the market at almost zero cost. Nuclear power stations are posting massive losses, Indeed, RWE is talking about closing some stations down because of the fall in prices on the electricity market. Secretary of State Rainer Baake has also repeated the enormous excess capacity on the market and the need to pull the plug on power stations.

The German Federal government to tackle corruption and bribes with precision

Berlin, January 21. The Federal Council of Ministers ratified a draft action document to send to the Minister of Justice Heiko Maas(SPD) in the struggle against transborder corruption and the payment of bribes in business. The document states that as cooperation increases, frontiers open up, and it gets easier for the growing influence of international organizations to transform corruption into a transnational phenomenon. Both active and passive corruption in “commercial traffic” should become more punishable for company staff and company consultants. At present, liability is restricted to anyone who acquires unlawful preference in the ambit of a competition by means of corruption, namely when a company purchaser accepts a bribe offered by a bidding supplier in exchange for that supplier to win the bid despite a competitor of the supplier having submitted a more advantageous bid. The Bill should align German penal law to the binding directives of the framework ruling of the European Union in its fight against corruption in the private sector and should create the conditions for the Council of Europe agreement on penal law and subsequent protocol to be ratified.