Mask affair: Sauter justifies its commissions – how the CSU reacts – Bavaria

Tuesday evening in the state parliament is already far advanced, almost 11 p.m. when a man gets up from his chair in the last row. The man sneaks almost deliberately to the lectern, his right hand in his trouser pocket, somehow nonchalant. But that is deceptive. After the performance that Alfred Sauter is about to put on, there is some evidence that his hand in his pants is clenched into a fist.

Since the public prosecutor’s office moved in with him in March 2021, Sauter, a member of the state parliament and former CSU Minister of Justice, has been silent almost continuously. That’s why others talked about him. Sauter did “serious damage”, said CSU leader Markus Söder about his party colleague, who received lavish commissions at the beginning of the corona pandemic because he brokered protective masks to the Free State. More than three years later, Sauter steps up to the lectern in the state parliament at the final debate on the committee of inquiry into the CSU mask affair. It’s an attempt at justification. And a reckoning with his party. insight? Zero.

Sauter, 72, pulls a few sheets of paper out of a yellow folder, leans his forearms on the desk and addresses Winfried Bausback, the CSU faction vice and chairman of the U-committee on the mask deals. Bausback said in his speech that “all procurements by the Free State were strictly in accordance with the law”. “It’s funny,” says Sauter, “that it takes a couple of bad guys after all.”

Because he got away without charge or punishment, Sauter tries to construct a contradiction: How can he be the culprit here if there is no guilty verdict? What Sauter fails to mention is that even the Munich Higher Regional Court, which saw no criminal liability, reprimanded the Bundestag for what the court considered insufficient bribery paragraphs for members of parliament – and Sauter for its transactions, which are suitable for the trust of the population in the integrity of members of parliament damage and “promote disenchantment with democracy”.

But Sauter is not concerned with people’s trust or democracy, at least not in his short, bitter speech in the state parliament. He wants to accuse the CSU, which condemned him and pushed him out of the parliamentary group, but to this day insists that there was no felt in the state mask business. Sauter uses this peculiar logic to try to whitewash himself. However, the attempt remains.

For him, says Sauter, “the politically interesting question” is why “there was almost no protective equipment” in the Free State, why third parties were needed at all to procure masks. Instead of the “causes of the procurement problem” it is now about the “discrediting of those who have made a contribution to solving the procurement problem”. Of course he means himself. In Winfried Bausback, the U-committee head, he seems to see the driver of a campaign against himself.

The Attorney General who initiated the investigation against him was “for many years the head of your office as Minister of Justice,” Sauter said to Bausback. This is probably intended as an indication of some kind of conspiracy that Sauter senses or at least starts up, because it might catch on with one or the other. “Shameful and embarrassing that Alfred Sauter behaved as a supposed victim of justice and helper in need,” Bausback later said. What Sauter did was “morally reprehensible, regardless of the legal assessment”. “He didn’t take the chance to apologize to the public,” says Bausback.

Sauter did not answer the question from SPD faction leader Florian von Brunn as to whether he saw moral misconduct in himself. He only explains that he “either taxed or donated” the money he received for arranging the masks. The moment when Vice-President Wolfgang Heubisch (FDP) interrupts him and reminds him of his limited speaking time is curious. “That’s how it is. Everyone can attack me as they please,” and then he only has a few minutes to explain himself. Sauter would have had plenty of time in the investigative committee, but he didn’t want to talk about it. “Instead of providing answers to the committee, Alfred Sauter only created theatrical thunder in the plenum,” says Florian Siekmann (Greens) afterwards, vice-chairman of the mask committee. When the thunder died down, Sauter slipped back into his seat, in the back row.

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