In view of additional operating cost demands for tenants of Münchner Wohnen (MW), some of which are in the four-digit range, the Left/Die Party city council group is now demanding consequences: The company, which only merged at the beginning of the year from the municipal housing companies GWG and Gewofag, should be excluded from the natural gas supply contract the Stadtwerke München (SWM). “End speculative gas contracts and relieve the burden on 30,000 households!” is the title of a media release from Wednesday.
The answers now received from Münchner Wohnen and Stadtwerke to a request from January have confirmed the group’s fears, it is said. “The heating costs of tens of thousands of households are based on short-term stock market data,” parliamentary group leader Stefan Jagel is quoted as saying: “That turns utility billing into a Russian roulette.”
Jagel refers to data from the residential area at Harthof. At the end of 2023, the first residents complained about the utility bills for 2022 and got the Left’s initiative rolling. As the MW confirmed, in the postcode area 80937, in which Harthof is located, significantly more installment payments were agreed in 2023 than in the previous year: 485 instead of 26. Jagel finds it “shocking”: “The gas contract concluded primarily affects the poorest people who have no savings have.”
In total, almost half of the MW inventory is heated with natural gas, 33,608 residential units or 47 percent. The GWG brought 18,792 apartments into the merger, the Gewofag 14,816. The controversial additional payments primarily affect the GWG, which signed a new gas supply contract with the GWG shortly before Russia’s war of aggression on Ukraine in February 2022 and the associated increase in gas prices municipal utilities had completed. In the agreement, the previously fixed annual fixed price was replaced by a so-called price escalation clause – the price for a kilowatt hour of gas is determined quarterly based on average values on the European energy exchange EEX in Leipzig.
The left-wing politicians think it’s a business with tastes. When GWG manager Christian Amlong signed the contract in November 2021, it was already foreseeable that it would be “highly speculative and to the detriment of the tenants,” according to the press release. It also points out that Amlong now has “a highly paid position with the contractual partner SWM”. The deal wasn’t worth it for the GWG tenants. For them, the net gas price has increased tenfold from around 2.5 to 25 cents by October 2022.
The increase could not have been foreseen when the contract was signed, Christian Decker, who is responsible for business customers at SWM, recently defended the agreement. The model with quarterly price adjustments is “gladly completed” in the housing industry, he said: “About half of the companies do that.”
The reverse conclusion: half of the housing companies prefer a fixed price in order to have planning and cost security for a whole year. MW managing director Christian Müller doesn’t think so: “We would have to decide on day .”
The left around Stefan Jagel also criticizes this: “Instead of self-critically dealing with the high back payments and admitting complicity, Munich housing and municipal utilities remain vague and refuse concrete insights into the gas contract.” The faction now has it in front of them – and gives reason to call for the exit.