The supervisory board of the municipal housing association Gewofag has postponed the decision on a possible dismissal of managing director Klaus-Michael Dengler. After a discussion, the committee “unanimously decided to adjourn the entire agenda” at its meeting on Tuesday, said Mayor and Gewofag supervisory board chief Verena Dietl (SPD) in a brief written statement. “Any personnel decisions” had not been made.
The meeting is said to have lasted about three hours, and the atmosphere is said to have been tense. As the SZ learned from participants, the CSU city council and supervisory board Andreas Babor submitted an application for the dismissal of Gewofag boss Dengler. However, the committee decided to await the report of the audit office on the allegations made against Dengler in several anonymous letters. The supervisory board then wants to meet before Easter for an extraordinary meeting, in which the members will probably decide on Dengler’s future.
There has been a lot of unrest in Gewofag for months because of the anonymous letters. The letters dealt with alleged bullying and high severance payments for unwelcome employees as well as the alleged mixing of professional and private life. Dengler rejects all allegations that these are “wrong, defamatory and damaging to reputation”. He has filed a criminal complaint against unknown persons. He also commissioned a forensic-linguistic report, which came to the conclusion that “with a very high degree of probability” the head of the Gewofag works council, Harald Wulf, is said to have written the anonymous letters. Wulf has meanwhile declared that Gewofag had given him notice without notice. He rejects the accusation that the letters came from him.
Language report leads to great irritation in Munich city politics
The language report, in turn, led to severe irritation in city politics because it also examined two CSU city councilors, Manuel Pretzl and Heike Kainz, who is the second deputy chairman of the Gewofag supervisory board. CSU faction leader Pretzl had demanded on Sunday that Dengler be “immediately released from his duties”. At least the largest opposition faction did not get through with this.
Apparently there was no pledge of allegiance for Dengler at the supervisory board meeting, on the contrary, Dengler’s replacement seems quite possible. A member of the control committee said that the expert opinion, which is seen across several factions in the city council as a breach of trust by Dengler, has given Gewofag’s already smoldering leadership crisis “a new seriousness”.
However, according to the green-red town hall coalition this week, one must also consider that Dengler’s contract runs until the end of May 2026. If there is no reason for termination, he is entitled to salary payments in the high six-digit range for the remainder of his contract.
The situation is tricky for the supervisory board: A replacement of the Gewofag boss would be a serious setback for the merger process of Gewofag and GWG to “Münchner Wohnen”, whose boss Dengler should be at least until now. Last year, the city dismissed the two-man management of the GWG, and this group has been managed on an interim basis since then.
Without Dengler, there would still be one managing director at Gewofag: Doris Zoller, the previous number two, the architect is primarily responsible for the construction area.
However, Zoller has already clearly sided with Dengler this week. Together with three other members of the management board, she published an article on Gewofag’s intranet, which said that Gewofag was “naturally very interested in finding out who the author of the anonymous letter was, in order to put a stop to it and restore peace in the company”. . The management is now “in good spirits that this dirty chapter of Gewofag, which is harmful to all of us, will soon be over”.