Berlin 12 August : The former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder is suing the Parliament of the country in the hope of restoring special rights he was stripped of in May his lawyer confirmed the news on Friday. The 78-year old is demanding he be returned an office in the parliamentary chambers in the case that he filed with the Berlin Administrative Court, his Hanover-based lawyer Michael Nagel told dpa news agency.
A German budget committee in the parliamentary chambers in May decided that Schroder who has been the subject of severe critique in Germany because of his links to Russia and Russia, had to give up his right to hold office in the Bundestag even though he would continue to get his pension and security details.
The legal team of the former Chancellor is asserting that the Bundestag budget committee’s decision to reduce funding for Schroder’s office in the Bundestag and shut it down was not legal according to a statement by the law firm accessed by the news agency dpa.
It’s “claimed that former President Gerhard Schroder is no longer doing his’remaining official duties’.However, it isn’t clarified what “remaining official responsibilities are in any way, what criteria to use to determine if they are actually performed, and what procedure should be followed in this respect” The statement reads.
The former Chancellor who served in his position between 1998 between 1998 and 2005, was repeatedly criticized due to his involvement with Russian state-owned companies .He is considered to be a close personal close friend of Russian president Vladimir Putin.
The pressure on Schroder to disengage himself from Putin was increased following Russia’s invasion of the neighboring Ukraine.
In May, he finally announced that he was leaving the board of supervisors of Rosneft, the Russian energy company Rosneft.
He also rejected an offer for the supervisory board at Gazprom which is another Russian energy giant.
His center-left SPD party decided there was no grounds for him to be exiled out of the party on Monday, after several weeks of review.
The committee in the northern German city of Hanover declared that Schroder did not infringe on party’s guidelines of the SPD by collaborating with Russian state-owned companies, which means there is no reason for expulsion or even reprimand.
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