Variable salary components – this is how Hagen Brandstätter wanted to understand what would generally be simply called a bonus. Bonus, special payment, money that you receive for special performance in addition to your salary. Patricia Schlesinger got it, as did a total of 27 in the RBB leadership. The management and some department heads would have been measured by the achievement of certain company goals, explained the acting director Brandstätter on Tuesday in the Brandenburg state parliament. But there was no bonus system in the RBB, he insisted.
Just one day later, the management of the RBB published the salaries of the top broadcasters to the workforce. Not only the basic salaries, but also the “performance-related remuneration”, so much cloaking apparently still had to be. As can be read on RBB24, the broadcaster’s news site, the administrative director of the broadcaster, the now acting director Brandstätter, receives 230,000 euros in basic remuneration – and more than 30,000 performance-related additional. The legal director and the production and operations director receive a basic salary of just under 200,000 euros and around 39,000 and 38,000 respectively. The program director, Jan Schulte-Kellinghaus, earns 215,000 euros, “performance-oriented” adds almost 31,000 euros.
The personnel that the workforce and the public are most interested in is missing: Patricia Schlesinger
In addition, Brandstäter announced on RBB, the members of the management received a monthly car allowance of 500 euros, a tax-free expense allowance of 250 euros, and an additional remuneration of 1700 for the period of the ARD chairmanship until the end of July euros gross.
Despite all late openness, this list lacks the personal details that the workforce and the public are most interested in: Patricia Schlesinger. The contract of the resigned director is currently being dissolved by the board of directors.
The ARD also published even before the scandal, the salaries of the directors. Accordingly, Schlesinger received a basic salary of 303,000 euros – before the controversial salary increase of 16 percent it was 261,000 euros. In fact, writes on Thursday business insider, Schlesinger’s contractual annual basic salary has been around 285,000 euros since 2018 and around 330,000 euros from 2021. “The bluff,” according to the business magazine, was possible because the RBB does not call the annual basic salary the basic salary, but the basic salary.
As Brandstäter explained in the state parliament, members of the management received their contractual salary as a “basic salary” if they fulfilled their “personalized goals”. The lower basic salary published by ARD would only have been Schlesinger’s or Brandtäter’s salary if they had missed their targets and received a malus. With normal performance, on the other hand, the basic salary was already 8.33 percent above the basic salary. The allowance increased for special performance.
Schlesinger’s total remuneration in 2020 should be loud Business Insider amounted to 347,000 euros. In addition to the then official base salary of 261,000 euros, Schlesinger received a target bonus of almost 62,000 euros. “Measured against their contractual base salary, this corresponded to an additional bonus payment of almost 38,000 euros,” calculates Business Insider before. In addition to her salary, there was a monthly expense allowance, family allowance and monetary benefits, so that Schlesinger received almost 400,000 euros from RBB in 2021, while the ARD transparency website spoke of almost a hundred thousand euros less. The RBB does not want to provide any information on the details of Patricia Schlesinger’s administration “in view of the investigations by the Attorney General’s Office”, which includes her salary. Schlesinger’s lawyer Ralf Höcker could not be reached for comment on Thursday.
Hagen Brandstätter explained the genesis of the bonuses in the RBB as follows in the state parliament: Since 2005, long before Schlesinger, there had been performance-related payments at the top of the station. A new system was introduced in 2018 with the support of the management consultancy Kienbaum. Brandstäter announced an end to bonus payments on Wednesday evening.