[mrkurt]

This is mostly an IBM process problem. Employees need to have "in country managers". We didn't have anyone in Germany, thus we had to scare someone up to have the new person report to on paper despite working with us. IBM itself can hire in basically any country, but for a lot of really irritating and well entrenched reasons, we're further limited by internal org structure and finance.

In theory, had the person relocated to the UK it would have been easier because we do have in country managers that know what we're up to there.