The intendant of the Berlin regional resort, accused of having abused its privileges, was dismissed.
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It had never happened in German audiovisual. Monday, August 15, Patricia Schlesinger, an intendant since 2016 of the Berlin regional public channel RBB, was immediately dismissed from its functions, after a vote almost unanimously of the board of directors. Eclabushed in several cases revealed at the end of June by the Business Insider site, she had resigned, a few days earlier, from her post as director of the Ard, the association of the nine regional stations of the country – one of the three pillars, with the channel ZDF and the DEUTSCHLANDFUNK radio, from the German public audiovisual. The scandal occurs at the worst time, while this system with complex structures is in full reform.
Patricia Schlesinger is criticized for abusing the privileges given to him by her functions, without the control bodies having intervened. The press revealed that, in addition to his salary of more than 300,000 euros per year, the former investigative journalist had benefited from copious “premiums on objectives” granted under low transparent conditions.
Private dinners
She is also accused of having given private dinners at home at the expense of her employer, of having ordered work of 1.4 million euros upstairs to her office In Berlin, or even enjoying a luxurious function sedan, equipped with massage seats. Her husband, a former converted journalist, would have obtained, thanks to her intermediary, advice missions for the Berlin Congress Palace, a public enterprise codirigated by the chairman of the supervisory chain RBB regional chain, Wolf-Dieter Wolf, who resigned on August 9. The Berlin prosecution has opened an investigation.
The case has taken such proportions that Friedrich Merz, the president of the Christian Democrat Union (CDU), the first opposition party, publicly denounced the dysfunctions of public audiovisual revealed by the scandal. “The Schlesinger affair has the potential to definitively deprive the audiovisual public service of its legitimacy and its acceptance by the public,” he warned in a gallery published on August 13. A serious warning stroke for German channels and radio radios, criticized for several years for their structures often seen as redundant, too expensive or poorly suited to the current media landscape.
Stations, which must finance their transition to digital, while traditional audiences have been falling, have been, for a few years, on the defensive. This is evidenced by the recent debate on the increase in the royalty, which had taken unpublished proportions in 2020, when the president of the Saxe-Anhalt region, Reiner Haseloff, had blocked the increase of 86 cents per month. It was only after a decision of the Constitutional Court that the reform had finally been endorsed.
The German fee is currently being 18.36 euros per month per household, or 220.32 euros per year (against 136 euros in France, before its abolition). In August 2021, a few weeks before taking office at the head of the ARD, Patricia Schlesinger justified the increase in the contribution to public audiovisual by explaining to the magazine der Spiegel:” Savings are our daily life. “