The rat and the sinking ship

Gerhard Schröder has long been an embarrassment to Germany, a former chancellor who got rich toadying to Vladimir Putin, even refusing to back down after Russia's brutal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. “I don’t do mea culpa,” he snipped when the New York Times challenged him on his Putin ties last month. “It’s not my thing.”

But money talks! On Thursday, the budget committee of the German parliament ruled that he would be stripped of his fat stipends worth more than $400,000 a year. (He would retain his government-supplied security guards, more's the pity!)

And what do you know? The very next day, Schröder stepped as chairman of the board of Rosneft, the state-controlled (i.e., Putin-controlled) Russian oil giant, for which he has earned $600,000 a year since 2017. He remains chairman of the shareholder committee of Nord Stream, the gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, worth a reported $270,000 a year. And three weeks before Russia invaded, Nord Stream's majority owner, Gazprom, announced that Schröder would join its board as well. No mention of whether that's still on, nor what it's worth, but it doesn't seem that the former chancellor will be on food stamps any time soon.