Minister of Finance does not allow SMS traffic with Porsche boss to be filed

The Federal Ministry of Finance, led by Christian Lindner (FDP), does not want to file the SMS traffic between him and the Porsche CEO Oliver Blume. The ministry now announced this in its answer to a written question from the Bundestag member Victor Perli (left), which WELT has exclusively. In the content of the text messages, one sees no "relevance for the content-related processing of an administrative process by the Federal Ministry of Finance," the ministry wrote.

As a consequence, this decision may allow the Ministry of Finance to also deny requests for access to these text messages under the Freedom of Information Act (IFG). The ministry has several such applications, including from the organization MPs Watch, but also from WELT.

A controversy arose over Lindner's SMS exchange with Blume because Blume had apparently boasted about his close ties to Lindner at a works meeting - especially during the coalition negotiations at the end of 2021 on the subject of the controversial e-fuels. "Christian Lindner has kept me up to date almost every hour in the last few days," Blume is said to have said on June 29, 2022, according to the ZDF satirical program "Die Anstalt". The car manager later apologized in the “Bild am Sonntag”. He had “chosen the wrong words in an internal event”.

In fact, one day before the works meeting on June 29, 2022, Lindner had sent two text messages to the Porsche boss about the current reporting by the dpa news agency "on e-fuels". The Ministry of Finance disclosed this in early August in a response to an earlier request from MP Perli.

According to this, the Porsche boss has received a total of eight text messages from the minister since Lindner took office. On July 22, shortly after the ZDF program was broadcast, Lindner sent three messages to Blume and called him. A day later, Lindner texted and phoned Blume again – apparently also to announce a statement from the FDP spokesman. Lindner also sent birthday wishes to the Porsche boss on June 6th - and he congratulated him on July 23rd on the announced promotion to boss at VW.

The Ministry of Finance's refusal to officially record this relatively lively exchange once again highlights the way the federal government keeps its files. Last week, WELT made it public that the Ministry of Finance, like other federal ministries, only takes the mail traffic from ministers and state secretaries to the files if their content is linked to so-called administrative processes at the working level in the ministry. The officials in the specialist departments are then responsible for the update. On the other hand, documents that were not returned to the responsible work units would be “destroyed”. The Ministry of Finance, then led by today's Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD), wrote this to the Wirecard committee of inquiry in the Bundestag at the beginning of 2021.

The federal government refers to its own registration guideline from the year 2001; the Ministry of Finance also mentioned this in its reply to the text messages from Lindner. However, this guideline does not contain any clear statement as to whether ministers and state secretaries can really be generally released from keeping files. Moreover, this regulatory text was created when there was no freedom of information law at the federal level. It only came into force in 2006.

"The federal registration guideline of July 2001 is not up to date," said the Freiburg constitutional lawyer and IFG expert Friedrich Schoch to WELT.

A judgment by the Federal Administrative Court in October 2021 also plays a role in the current controversy. The judges had decided that Twitter direct messages from government officials can also be subject to the IFG in individual cases. On the other hand, information of a “trivial character” should not be recorded.

At the same time, however, the court had accepted the argument of the federal government that it needed to be linked to an "administrative process". It is unclear whether the judges were aware that this line of argument could lead to important parts of the communication by ministers and state secretaries being withdrawn from access via the IFG.

As late as June 2022, the federal and state freedom of information officers required the authorities to “document all relevant official communication via short message services, messenger services, social media and SMS, in particular from members of the government, in order to guarantee access to information.”

The Berlin lawyer and IFG expert Christoph Partsch, who also regularly represents WELT in information procedures, takes a similar view: "What a federal minister writes is always relevant in case of doubt," he said.

The left-wing MP Perli now sharply criticized the Ministry of Finance in relation to the Lindner SMS: "A federal minister can obviously chat happily with corporate bosses without the federal government documenting this in files," said Perli WELT. This leads "the rules of the Freedom of Information Act ad absurdum and makes government control of parliament and the public more difficult". According to Perli, he found it "absurd to claim that such an exchange would have no meaning for events in the federal government".

When asked about these allegations, the Ministry of Finance referred to its previous answers. "In principle, every citizen has the opportunity to submit an application in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act," assured the authority's press office.