Despite calls for his resignation from his own party, Mitte district mayor Stephan von Dassel (Greens) does not want to resign from his post. “I will not resign. Because that would mean acknowledging the allegations,” said von Dassel on Tuesday of the German Press Agency (dpa).
Von Dassel is accused of having offered money to a losing applicant in a recruitment process in the Mitte district office so that he could withdraw his complaint against the district’s selection decision. A confidant of Dassels, who was also a member of the district executive committee of the Greens in Mitte, had previously been selected. This had also caused criticism within the party.
“The allegations that we had an amigo affair at the district office are wrong,” said von Dassel. In the recruitment process, there was no preference for an applicant because of his party membership, but it was purely a selection of the best. “And the allegation that I offered private money to an unsuccessful applicant to drop his lawsuit is also false.”
Von Dassel announced that he would speak about the events at the special session of the district assembly (BVV) on Thursday. He will present the facts “as they correspond to the facts,” he said. Von Dassel himself had applied to the Berlin Senate Chancellery to initiate disciplinary proceedings against himself in the previous week in order to have the allegations investigated.
On Thursday, the BVV will start a voting procedure against von Dassel, the decisive vote is scheduled for September 8th. There is a large majority for his deselection. In addition to the SPD, CDU, Left and FDP, von Dassel’s own Greens parliamentary group has spoken out in favor of his resignation and has otherwise threatened to be voted out.
The incident triggered enormous upheaval in the Greens. Most recently, the district executive of the party in Mitte opposed the decision of its own parliamentary group – and thus indirectly also against the two state chairmen Susanne Mertens and Philmon Ghirmai, who also spoke out in favor of Dassels’ resignation.
The action of the district board is now in turn met with criticism from the BVV parliamentary group: “We think it’s a pity that the district board is now changing its position and opposing its own Greens group in the BVV, our census partner of the SPD group and the Greens state board Berlin,” says an internal party statement that is available to the Tagesspiegel.
Meanwhile, Stephan von Dassel apparently wants to take legal action against the reporting of the allegations against him. His lawyer Christian Schertz announced legal steps – “also to prevent further damage to reputation and to correct the damage to reputation that has already occurred,” as he told the dpa. Like von Dassel before him, the prominent lawyer denied that von Dassel had made a concrete offer of payment to the plaintiff via SMS, which “was never made”.
The plaintiff himself, on the other hand, even declared that in his previous telephone call with von Dassel “both sides agreed” that “it was about three months’ salary at salary level A15”. That was only the basis for further talks about a private-law agreement, von Dassel even referred to the previously “outlined framework conditions”.
