“ZDF Magazin Royale”
“Take full responsibility”: That’s what Fynn Kliemann says about Jan Böhmermann’s allegations
Fynn Kliemann on his farm “Kliemannsland”
© Hauke-Christian Dittrich/ / Picture Alliance
He passed out Asian masks as European ones and donated inferior goods to refugees: Jan Böhmermann’s allegations against Fynn Kliemann are tough. Now the accused has responded.
Jan Böhmermann has already published a contribution to “ZDF Magazin Royale” in advance, which will be broadcast on ZDF on Friday evening. In it, the moderator deals with the business conduct of Fynn Kliemann. The allegations are fierce: the artist and entrepreneur, together with his business partner Tom Illbruck, relabeled masks that were manufactured in Bangladesh and Vietnam at dumping wages and then resold them as fair and produced in Portugal. He also “donated” 100,000 defective masks from Bangladesh to refugee shelters in Bosnia and Greece.
Hard stuff, to which the accused now reacts in a long statement that the editors have received: “I would like to formally apologize to all people, organizations, institutions who are now disappointed and shocked ‘at first sight’,” begins the 34-year-old wrote his three-page letter in reply to the article by “ZDF Magazin Royale”. Kliemann puts the words “at first sight” in quotation marks, because he wrongly sees himself in a bad light. He claims that “those cheating allegations just aren’t true.”
He said he never sold or advertised the masks made in Bangladesh. “I only offered masks via www.maskeoderso.de and these came 100 percent from Portugal and Serbia.” The masks in question were a pure wholesale contingent for trading partners and bulk buyers and were only sold to them. All buyers of these masks were informed in advance about the country of origin.
Fynn Kliemann wants to take responsibility
Kliemann describes the emails in which his business partner Tom Illbruck wrote about the “relabeling” of the masks as “bad”, and the formulation is rightly criticized. The artist and businessman tries to explain that he didn’t notice it at the time by saying that he was overwhelmed at the time: “I have to admit that I couldn’t keep track of the process anymore.” He takes responsibility for that.
Kliemann, on the other hand, rejects Böhmermann’s accusation that the masks were produced under wage dumping: “Global Tactics paid exactly the same production costs for the masks as in Serbia: 40 euro cents per mask.”
The man from Lower Saxony makes it clear: “Yes, I made money selling European masks through my shop. But with regard to the country of origin, I have never deceived anyone or spent anything on something that it wasn’t.”
Defective masks at refugee camps?
The accusation that he had delivered defective masks to refugee camps hit him the hardest. Kliemann puts it this way: “According to the producers, these masks were not defective or had a poor protective effect. They were just slightly larger than the original specification,” it continues.
The “ZDF Magazin Royale” contradicts this in one respect thread posted on Twitter. It says: “The masks were ‘single-layer instead of double-layer’, so much too thin, even for low demands on an infection protection effect. The rubber bands of the masks were of different lengths and colors, the seams came off far too easily.”
Kliemann’s contrition can be clearly seen in the statement. He wanted to “apologize to everyone who has followed me for so long and has absolute confidence in my work”. And he wants to draw conclusions from the affair: “In the future I will check all chains, elements, processes, processes much more meticulously and only do what I really have 100 percent in my own hands.”
In conclusion, he writes: “I am convinced that I want to continue to positively shape society and the world around me and, in particular, to want to improve it.” That might be difficult, at least in the near future. Because the allegations weigh heavily, and Fynn Kliemann has not been able to clear them all up to now.
Sources used: Youtube.com/ZDFMagazinRoyale, LMAAFK.de, Twitter