€1.13 Million in Ministry Grants, Then the CEO Role: Germany's Revolving Door
October 19, 2026 · Frisian News
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Germany's environment ministry gave the European Climate Foundation €1.13 million in 2024 and up to €670,000 in 2025. The foundation then appointed the ministry's own state secretary, Jochen Flasbarth, as its next chief executive, with no cooling-off period required under current rules.
Germany's environment ministry paid the European Climate Foundation €1.13 million in 2024, Welt reported, and the foundation's own entry in the Bundestag lobby register records a further €660,001 to €670,000 from the same ministry in 2025. On October 5, 2026, that foundation's supervisory board appointed Jochen Flasbarth, the ministry's state secretary, as its next chief executive. He takes the post on February 1, 2027.
The timeline is simple. Flasbarth led the government department that funded the ECF. The ECF then hired him for the top job. He applied for retirement from the civil service by November 5 and is expected to leave the ministry in early November. His successor, Heike Henn, will be in post only weeks before COP31 in Antalya, Turkey.
A ministry spokeswoman confirmed that Flasbarth would no longer attend COP31 in an official capacity.
German transparency NGO LobbyControl called the move legal under current rules but "not unproblematic." Christina Deckwirth of LobbyControl told Der Freitag that mandatory cooling-off periods of 12 to 18 months apply to ministers and parliamentary state secretaries but not to civil-servant state secretaries such as Flasbarth. "It is important that cooling-off periods should also apply to civil-servant state secretaries and that the existing rules are strengthened," she said. She added that it remained unclear whether the ministry's review and approval of the move had been completed. LobbyControl said it had no evidence that the grants had served as a job application.
Deckwirth also raised the question of future access. "The ministry must ensure that the European Climate Foundation does not gain privileged access to politics through this move, for example that through Flasbarth's contacts with his former colleagues, more public money now flows into the foundation," she said. Germany's federal government is set to spend some €268 million of taxpayers' money on environmental and climate projects run by NGOs between 2020 and 2027, Brussels Signal reported.
The foundation has not disclosed the financial terms of Flasbarth's new role. His predecessor, Laurence Tubiana, received around €663,500 in 2025 and €768,000 in 2024. Flasbarth's current basic salary is around €17,000 a month. He will take early retirement on leaving the civil service, a mechanism available to German civil servants from age 63, and his state pension runs alongside his new salary despite a reduction of around 8 per cent for early departure. Left-wing outlet Der Spiegel called the switch questionable, citing its pace and what it described as princely remuneration.
The ECF is not a small actor. The foundation distributed €171 million to more than 600 organisations in 60 countries in 2025, on a budget of almost €258 million, across 959 grants to 631 recipients. The foundation says public money accounts for less than 1 per cent of its income, with the bulk coming from donors including the Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies and the IKEA and Robert Bosch foundations. The German government contributions, small by the ECF's total scale, ran through the ministry where Flasbarth served as state secretary.
The ECF's supervisory board chair, Kate Hampton, said Flasbarth "shares ECF's commitment to civil society" and that the appointment followed an international search that began in March 2026.
Germany has revolving-door rules. They do not cover this case.
Published October 19, 2026 · Frisian News