Now the opposition in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania wants to know exactly what is behind this strange climate foundation in favor of the Baltic Sea pipeline. The CDU, Greens and FDP are applying for a parliamentary committee of inquiry, as they announced on Friday in Schwerin Castle. The committee is primarily intended to clarify how this foundation supported the construction of the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia in north-eastern Germany, financed by Nord Stream 2 AG and Gazprom.
Among other things, the three factions want to determine what money went where and when and what role the state government of SPD Prime Minister Manuela Schwesig played. “I assume,” said FDP parliamentary group leader René Domke, “that we will still be very surprised.”
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In January 2021, the MV Climate and Environmental Protection Foundation was founded by the Schwerin state parliament. The country paid in 200,000 euros, Nord Stream 20 million euros, and later another 40 million euros. In this way, US sanctions against the completion of the tubes should be circumvented, for example, the foundation acquired a special ship and bought in the port of Rostock.
Doubts about the earlier “secondary foreign policy”
To this day, the chairman of the foundation is former SPD prime minister Erwin Sellering, Schwesig’s predecessor. He celebrated the success of the climate foundation in continuing construction of the pipeline in January 2022, when Russian troops were already on the border with Ukraine. After the attack by Putin’s army, the foundation was stopped, and now the red-red cabinet in Schwesig wants it to be dissolved, although the foundation is defending itself with legal arguments.
Witnesses are to be invited to the investigative committee, including Schwesig, Sellering and probably also Matthias Warnig, CEO of Nord Stream 2 and Putin’s confidant. The MV climate foundation had previously refused to provide information on the support of Nord Stream 2, but was asked by the Schwerin district court to make it public. When it was founded, there was no dissenting voice. At that time, the Greens and the FDP were not yet in the state parliament, but the CDU, at the time part of a grand coalition, was. According to CDU faction leader Franz-Robert Liskow, they were “credulous”. The “secondary foreign policy as a country” was “not questioned” in the country.