[ChuckNorris89]

Wirecard, Dieselgate, BER Airport, German gov wireing the whole country with copper instead of fiber because the ministry of infrastructure had connections to the copper business leaving the country's internet behind Ukraine, all Gov IT projects going to SAP or T-Systems with no accountability, etc.

Nobody went to jail for any of those and in some cases it was never investigated. If you're on the DAX, you're untouchable in Germany.

[H8crilA]

You forgot about Deutsche Bank. David Enrich has written a lot about criminal activities going on in there. It is a bank for the "unbanked elites", that is for people that will no longer be accepted by any other financial institution.

That being said - we will certainly see a lot of fraud in other countries too. The fraud cycle follows the business cycle.

[calaphos]

Deutsche Bank is not a state institution, neither is it partially or fully owned by a state entity (like Deutsche Bahn or VW). The national bank would be deutsche Bundesbank.

[Fnoord]

Scandals are everywhere, as is corruption. In comparison, Germany is #13 on the Democracy Index [1]. It is right below The Netherlands and Switzerland, the top countries being the Scandinavian ones, plus Anglo-Saxon countries (New Zealand, Canada, Australia).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

[riffraff]

AFAIU the Democracy Index is based on, essentially, people making up numbers.

The broad classifications are probably alright, but I wouldn't pay much attention to the specific rankings.

[Flockster]

Do you have a source for the copper claim? That is entirely new to me.

[ChuckNorris89]

https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/deutschland-warum-unsere...

[Translated from German] Christian Schwarz-Schilling had been Post Minister under Helmut Kohl since 1982 and launched the German mobile phone network at the end of the 1980s. His political understanding of infrastructure can be seen in a disturbing fact: Until a few hours (!) before he was sworn in as Post Minister - Schwarz-Schilling was involved in a copper cable company. He sold his shares to Nixdorf. The company was then "one of the most important newcomers in the cable business". Contrary to most expert advice, Schwarz-Schilling pushed the extensive investment in copper cable instead of fibre optics during his term of office, in other words: politically, he acted entirely in the interests of the buyer of his shares. In any case, exactly 30 years ago, SPIEGEL called the mobile phone licensing for which Schwarz-Schilling was responsible "a festival of lobbyists".

The fact that nobody got jailed for this obvious corruption is staggering to me and German politicians dare lecture Southern Europe on corruption.

[golem14]

More recently, Germany's insistence to go all in the hydrogen economy has the same flair.

[mschuster91]

Hydrogen is a backup plan, and a sensible one at that. Germany doesn't have much in terms of lithium and other precursors for batteries, besides we have an awful lot of old rural non electrified train routes where the cheapest option by far is to go to hydrogen.

[mschuster91]

Holy hell. Thanks for this one.

[quassy]

@Fnoord (can't respond to your comment directly weirdly) How can anyone seriously rank Australia and the UK so far high up?