Marshalling yard in Maschen, Lower Saxony: half a billion euros, but no control
Photo: Daniel Bockwoldt / dpa
The image of Deutsche Bahn is not looking great.
The fellow passengers complain about delayed trains, politicians about the horrific debts of almost 35 billion euros.
Now the top controllers in the state take their word for it.
"Customers perceive the railway as shabby, and we can't afford that," says Kay Scheller, President of the Federal Audit Office (BRH).
Every December his authority presents an annual report, simply called "Remarks", and this time the Bonn auditors have chosen Deutsche Bahn as one of their focal points. What they record of test results on a total of 50 pages is devastating. Money seeps away, is misappropriated, supervisors have a conflict of interests, competitors are slowed down. The organization with its 600 subsidiaries is bloated and does not focus on the core business.
In their comments, the auditors do not only criticize the railway itself. They start with the Federal Ministry of Transport and its outgoing Minister Andreas Scheuer.
Its department is responsible for appointing supervisory boards, and following a tradition, a number of Bundestag politicians have been sent to the supervisory body for many years for a fee.
"On the other hand, the MPs are committed to the interests of the federal government in their full-time work," notes the Federal Audit Office in its report, which will be handed over to parliament on Tuesday and which is available to SPIEGEL.
At the expense of rail customers and citizens
As a supervisory board, you have to represent the Deutsche Bahn company; as a member of parliament, you are responsible for the entire country's railway system, and this includes private railway operators. "The MPs are players and referees in one," as BRH President Scheller put it. They should influence the market organization, but at the same time they also influence the railways. "That weakens the competition and is at the expense of rail customers and citizens," said Scheller.
The BRH calls on the new federal government to break with this practice.
You are not allowed to send members from the Bundestag or persons from the federal ministries to the supervisory board of the railway.
Especially since the federal government did not issue a new regulation on conflicts of interest in federal investments until 2020, which would be in sharp contradiction to the practice at the railways, according to the BRH.
Profits are not used for infrastructure
Another accusation by the Court of Auditors concerns the railways' profits from the operation and maintenance of the rail network.
By law, the state-owned company is obliged to cede these to the federal government, which then passes them on to the railways in order to maintain the infrastructure.
This is actually intended to ensure that the railway creates a functioning network with a total of 48 billion euros that it will receive from the federal government within a period of four years.
But in two out of four years, the railway did not transfer all profits, but kept them in the group.
The auditors therefore demand from the Ministry of Transport that it should "demand that the railway infrastructure companies' profits that have not yet been transferred to the federal government, in breach of the contract, be used by DB AG in order to use them for the rail network."
Modernization of marshalling yards stalled
The Court of Auditors finds numerous examples of how lax the control of the Ministry of Transport is. The railway received almost half a billion euros for the expansion of marshalling yards. It just didn't check whether the money was actually being used efficiently and sensibly. That is what the BRH officials did and came to sobering results: Although 639 million euros have now been built, only four of the ten measures have been completed since 2008, the last one to be completed in 2026.
The performance of the implemented measures, however, fell short of the railway by almost 30 percent.
The auditors complained that marshalling yards are important for getting goods off the road onto the rails.
Transport Minister Scheuer and his ministerials obviously didn't care.
"The Federal Ministry of Transport did not set specific climate protection targets for the package of measures," complained the auditors.
New roads instead of rail connections
The Christian Socialist always emphasized how important the railway was to him. There was hardly a train ride after which he did not post a photo of himself and one of the railway employees on board on the social networks. This is in sharp contrast to what the auditors discovered: the ministry misappropriated 124 million euros, and Scheuer's people put the sum into the construction of roads and airport companies in which the federal government is involved. The funds were actually intended to be used to lay a siding for companies. The misappropriation "ultimately goes against the intended transport and climate protection goals," writes the BRH.
The audit office never tires of discovering breaches of duty on the part of the railway and its owner. When investing in the infrastructure, the audit office checked randomly: five construction works on bridges and one on a tunnel. Sometimes regulations were ignored during planning, which led to expensive additional claims from construction companies. Times, DB Netz awarded construction contracts “on the basis of inadequate draft plans”. That, too, led to "avoidable supplements" amounting to millions.
Not much imagination is lacking in the idea that the mismanagement that was exposed in this way was the rule rather than a mere chance hit.
"DB Netz AG failed to take the simplest and most obvious measures," say the BRH officials in their report.
The President of the Court of Auditors, Scheller, combines the presentation of the report with the hope that the next legislature could do better with the supervision of the railway.
The coalitionists wanted to make improvements to the structure of the railway, which were "important steps in the right direction," said Scheller.
The designated Federal Transport Minister Volker Wissing from the FDP should not, however, hope that the auditors would look a little more generously at Deutsche Bahn in the future.
Scheller promised an even more detailed investigation of his officials for the coming year.
