Federal government wins against the states in GDR legacy issue
During the privatization of former GDR companies, it is decided that the federal and state governments must assume responsibility for the ecological contamination that has arisen there. Due to the high costs, a financing dispute begins. Now Karlsruhe decides.
In the funding dispute at the Federal Constitutional Court between the federal government and the states of Saxony and Thuringia regarding the costs of cleaning up environmental damage caused by former GDR state-owned enterprises, the federal government can breathe a sigh of relief. This is because it does not have to pay any more for the remediation of ecological contaminated sites from the GDR in Saxony and Thuringia than has already been agreed. Applications by the two states were rejected as inadmissible by the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe. According to the court, the two states did not demonstrate that the federal government was constitutionally obliged to bear future costs.
The background to this are agreements made in the course of reunification. Former state-owned companies in the GDR were transferred to the federally owned Treuhandanstalt and privatized by the latter. In many cases, the Treuhand agreed with investors to indemnify them against liability for environmental damage that those companies had previously caused.
In 1992, the federal government and the East German states concluded an agreement regulating the financing of the environmental legacy. According to the press release, this agreement provides, among other things, for a distribution of the indemnification costs for ecological contaminated sites between the Treuhand (60 or 75 percent) and the respective state (40 or 25 percent).
Remediation more expensive than planned
As a result of practical difficulties in implementation, some states concluded general agreements with the Treuhand - Thuringia in 1999 and Saxony in 2008. This largely determined how much the federal government would have to pay. The agreements also stipulated that in certain cases and in the event of higher costs than assumed, renegotiations were to take place.
Saxony and Thuringia realized that the renovations would be more expensive than planned. However, the Federal Ministry of Finance and the Federal Agency for Real Estate Tasks did not want to renegotiate. The two states therefore turned to the Constitutional Court.
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The dispute over the additional costs for environmental remediation in former GDR state-owned enterprises in Saxony and Thuringia reached the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, as the states argued that the initial agreements were not sufficient to cover the increased costs. Despite their appeal, the Federal Constitutional Court upheld the previous agreements, stating that the federal government was not constitutionally obligated to bear the future costs. This decision was significant, particularly in the context of environmental protection efforts in Thuringia and Saxony, which have their roots in the GDR era.
Source: www.ntv.de
