Close Baerbock employee becomes a lobbyist at RWE

It is a bang for the Greens and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock: Your former office manager in the office of the MP and most recently an employee in the minister's office in the Foreign Office, Titus Rebhann, will become the chief lobbyist in Berlin at the energy company RWE on March 1, 2023. This was confirmed by WELT from company circles.

Baerbock had brought Rebhann from her office in the Bundestag. He previously worked for years in the office of Green energy politician Oliver Krischer, who has been environment minister in North Rhine-Westphalia since June 2022. With Rebhann, the RWE group based in Essen in the Ruhr area can not only count on Rebhann's contacts in the federal government, but also in the black-green state government in Düsseldorf. However, he should deliberately not do any lobbying with the Foreign Office.

According to reports, Rebhann will take over the management of the group's Berlin representative office. RWE advertised this position in the summer. According to information from WELT, Rebhann had applied for the position himself. According to reports, the group is now counting on his contribution to the "transformation" of the company. Rebhann was released from his previous position at the Federal Foreign Office in mid-October.

According to the job advertisement for the group representative office, the central tasks there include “accompanying the political opinion-forming processes on key energy-related issues and positioning RWE as a competent partner in the field of renewable energies”.

The RWE Group is actually highly controversial among environmentalists because of its role in lignite mining in NRW. The group is also the operator of the Emsland nuclear power plant in Lingen. It is one of the three reactors that should actually be shut down at the end of the year, but according to the will of the traffic light coalition should now continue to run until mid-April. After the recent federal elections, RWE also announced increased investments in renewable energies.

In the spring, it already caused debate that Annalena Baerbock's husband, Daniel Holefleisch, joined the PR and lobbying agency MSL as a partner.

The Federal Foreign Office and Rebhann himself have so far left WELT's inquiries about the latest personnel unanswered.

Correction: In a first version, we wrote incorrectly that Rebhann was the office manager at the Federal Foreign Office. We have corrected this.