Modeling behavior as if there are specific lines might not be the best way. Your friend isn’t the only one who thought that the politicians who received the money in the mask deals could have gotten away with it. Quite obviously those politicians also thought so at the time they made the deals. Those politicians in turn likely do understand the environment in which they are operating and how the lines are gerrymandered.
Different people have different political strengths and can defend themselves in different ways when they are at the center of a scandal. The metoo allegations against Joe Biden did nothing, not because there aren’t norms, but because it wasn’t in the interest of the Democratic establishment to enforce norms.
His mistake was this: He assumed that, if there was a norm against corruption, it would follow a definition of corruption that did in some way actually corresponds to the degree to which the act was harmful.
I expect that most of the involved politicians would say that the mask deals were more harmful than the letter that Amthor wrote. I do think they believed that the COVID-crisis is very serious and that acting badly in it’s context is very harmful. If you want to get people to follow a mask mandate, having politicians profit from deals with mask manufacturers is serious harm.
Does it make sense that MPs are obliged to formally record monetary payments they receive, but not stock options? Not really, but that is how it is.
That’s a mechanism about how disclosure works but not one about the political pressure to resign after the scandal came public. I also don’t think that the way the disclosure rules work here is a feature of gerrymandering. It’s just that the German disclosure rules are not written with MPs being employed by startups that pay their board in stock options in mind given that most MPs work in other settings.
He thought that politicians could totally get away with this. How did he acquire that belief? A while earlier it was revealed that another politician received stock options from an IT startup, for which he then put in a good word at the government.
This summary ignores what the case was about. It’s legal for a German MP to put in a good word with the government. An MP is free to be hired. The thing that’s not legal for a German MP is to put in a good word for someone that pays them in their role as MP. Amthor used the letterhead of his parliamentary office and that’s what makes it illegal corruption. If he would have actually used the letterhead of being a board member of the corporation, that letter would have been legal.
When it comes to the mask deals then the allegation is that the relevant MPs acted in the scope of their job as MPs when they arranged the deal and it wasn’t just a matter of using the wrong letterhead to make it legal. The mask deal is also hard to imagine without someone explicitly telling the MP that they are getting the money for making the deal.
With Amthor on the other hand it was not clear that anybody explicitly told him to do what he did with the government. And that does matter legally.
Modeling behavior as if there are specific lines might not be the best way. Your friend isn’t the only one who thought that the politicians who received the money in the mask deals could have gotten away with it. Quite obviously those politicians also thought so at the time they made the deals. Those politicians in turn likely do understand the environment in which they are operating and how the lines are gerrymandered.
Different people have different political strengths and can defend themselves in different ways when they are at the center of a scandal. The metoo allegations against Joe Biden did nothing, not because there aren’t norms, but because it wasn’t in the interest of the Democratic establishment to enforce norms.
I expect that most of the involved politicians would say that the mask deals were more harmful than the letter that Amthor wrote. I do think they believed that the COVID-crisis is very serious and that acting badly in it’s context is very harmful. If you want to get people to follow a mask mandate, having politicians profit from deals with mask manufacturers is serious harm.
That’s a mechanism about how disclosure works but not one about the political pressure to resign after the scandal came public. I also don’t think that the way the disclosure rules work here is a feature of gerrymandering. It’s just that the German disclosure rules are not written with MPs being employed by startups that pay their board in stock options in mind given that most MPs work in other settings.
This summary ignores what the case was about. It’s legal for a German MP to put in a good word with the government. An MP is free to be hired. The thing that’s not legal for a German MP is to put in a good word for someone that pays them in their role as MP. Amthor used the letterhead of his parliamentary office and that’s what makes it illegal corruption. If he would have actually used the letterhead of being a board member of the corporation, that letter would have been legal.
When it comes to the mask deals then the allegation is that the relevant MPs acted in the scope of their job as MPs when they arranged the deal and it wasn’t just a matter of using the wrong letterhead to make it legal. The mask deal is also hard to imagine without someone explicitly telling the MP that they are getting the money for making the deal.
With Amthor on the other hand it was not clear that anybody explicitly told him to do what he did with the government. And that does matter legally.