How To F#€k Up An Airport #3: Money for Nothing

This podcast contains occasional course language and an infuriating lack of accountability. Every Berliner knows the new airport isn't finished yet. If you know, exactly why. We're here to explain. I'm Joel Dalroy. And I'm Maisie Hitchcock. Along with Yoran Mandik and Daniel Stern, we'll be deconstructing the debacle that is Berlin-Brandenburg Airport, nicknamed "Villy Brunt". Airport Code B-E-R. The last episode ended at the moment when, for the first time, it became clear that something was going wrong at B-E-R. After four years of construction, the opening date of June 2012 has been scrapped. Costs have increased to an estimated £3 billion euro. The Regional Building Authority has refused to approve a plan to use humans as living fire alarms. On this episode, in competence, evolves into corruption. So, there was now controlling processes inside. It was easier as well, like, to steal materials, cutting cables and selling in the market. You can make an extra salary. And heads finally start to roll. The company, the FBI, had to pay Reiner Schwartz his whole bonuses and the remaining contract payments in full. And that's what he got out of being a bad CEO. Inside the B-E-R terminal, behind the walnut wood paneling, beneath the marble tiles, things are a mess. But from the outside, the building looks pretty nice, actually. And you can see so for yourself. Today, you can drive southeast along the A-13 highway of Berlin, past the existing Schönefeld Airport and follow the exit sign marked Berlin-Brandenburg Airport. The little airplane sign is covered up, less than anyone gets false hopes. And except for the planes, the whole terminal is there. And there's nothing to stop anyone driving right up to the front as if you're dropping off passengers at departures. That's exactly what Iran Mandik and I did one foggy evening. We're driving along the road. You can actually drive right up to the terminal gates. You can actually get right up close to the terminal or we're doing it right now. And I bet we're helping the street to unmold as well. Look at this, it's like a proper airport. While we're seeing lights, we're seeing the airport building right now. Wow, it's fancy as shit. Look at that. It looks like it will be working, wouldn't it? Okay, so there's a flat roof, very long columns. It looks neat. Okay, we're parking. We're standing in front of the airport. There's a huge experience of concrete. But you can see bits of grass already growing through it. This airport is already starting to feel old and abandoned even before it's opened. Look at this building, it's majestic almost in this fog. I had to say it, but it's very impressive. How would you describe it architecturally? A giant UFO to set upon Bruntburg. But it's too rectangular to be a UFO to anything. It's very square, it's very neo-modern. What do you know about alien spaceship architecture? There we go, square for sure. I reckon. I bought you here for a very specific reason. I want to show you something. Come this way. We can see a glass box sticking out of the ground. And in the glass box, what can you see? Are these the famous infamous escalators that do not work at all? Okay, the escalators curve up to the top. You get off the escalator and then about two meters on. You get to another three steps that you have to climb to actually get to the top. These escalators are in fact too short. I have an alternative theory. Can I tell you what it is? The problem here is not that the escalators are too short. But the ground is too high. So that's stupid. I think the ground didn't fuck up in this case. I think it was the responsibility of whoever fucking planned this thing. Well, when you think about it, it could be worse. I mean, if you're an escalator, you can walk. No one's getting on an escalator who can't walk. It would be more of a fuck up if it was in front of an elevator. If the lift ended like half a meter from the top. The short escalators were installed in the race to complete BER ahead of the planned opening in June 2012. They were just one of many mistakes discovered in an audit of the building site that followed that embarrassing cancellation. One of very many mistakes. 150,000 mistakes to be exact as was later emitted by the airport company FBB. And it wasn't even the worst mistake. At least short escalators can't start a fire. Fuck up, number 18. Make it very easy to start a fire. A lot of errors at BER were just plain silly. These ones were potentially deadly. The auditors called in to assess the state of the construction site in late 2012 were trying to get to the cause of the failed emergency communication system, which included fire alarms, emergency announcements, and a connection to the airport fire station. What they discovered has since been labelled cable salad. The cause of the cable salad is the same reason behind a failed smoke ventilation system called the monster, which we heard about in the last episode. Every time the airport managers and politicians changed the floor plan, new wires had to be added to the cable enclosures. But the aesthetically ideal plans, laid out by Mindhard von Gerken's architecture bureau, left very little room for extra cables. So, workers began stuffing new wires into the cable enclosures, like commuters on a Tokyo subway. In their rush, they laid high-voltage power cables in the same enclosure as cables carrying communication data for the emergency systems. Power cables have a tendency to heat up. The outcome could have been explosive. And no one could have called the fibre gate. Cleaning up the cable salad has been one of the biggest and most tedious jobs in the years since. More than 40 kilometres of extra cable channels have been added, and more than 6,000 kilometres of cables have been torn out and reinstalled. Oh, and speaking of the monster smoke extraction system, it was discovered that to increase its capacity, giant extraction fans weighing 4,000 kg had been installed on the roof of the building. These were twice as large as the original plans allowed for. Building work had to come to a complete standstill due to fears that these giant ventilation systems could cause the roof to collapse. Fuck up number 19. We couldn't stop a fire! If a fire were to start in the airport, the sprinkler system would put it out right. Well, the BER sprinkler system was designed with around 50,000 sprinkler heads. After numerous building expansions, it now has over 78,000 sprinkler heads. But the pipes supplying the water weren't scaled up, meaning that in some places they are too thin to deliver the required volume of water to put out of fire. The entire system has had to be remodeled, and each sprinkler head has had to be tested for its water distribution capacity. On top of that, the backup generator connected to the sprinklers was found to be too small to keep the water pumping in the event of a power failure. You want some more life-threatening mistakes? Automatic windows, which are supposed to close during a fire, were found to have motors that fail above 30 degrees centigrade. That's about as hot as Berlin ever gets on a summer's day, but it's considerably less than the heat of a fire. And it was discovered that hundreds of walls that were designed as fire protection walls were incorrectly built using the wrong materials. More than 600 such walls had to be fully or partially torn down and reconstructed. Fire alarms, smoke extraction, sprinklers, fire walls. These things only really matter in the case of a fire, right? As long as we avoid starting fires, things should be fine. B.E.R. builders, forget to install lightning rods. Be it set August 1, 2014. Oh dear. Fuck up, number 20. Select your room numbers by Bingo. The main entrance hall to the B.E.R. terminal is a huge and quite impressive open expanse, stretching high and wide and giving visitors quite a sense of space. The rest of the terminal isn't so spacious. Starting at the security controls, things get a little bit more restrictive. In fact, there are more than 4,500 rooms in B.E.R. It started out with a lot less, but the planners kept adding rooms as their ambitions grew. And that created a practical challenge, how to keep track of all the rooms. This is important during construction when you have to make sure each room gets fitted out with the right infrastructure. And it matters in an emergency when firefighters are rushing to locate a room where a fire might have been detected. That B.E.R. each new room added to the plan got a new number, but they weren't assigned sequentially. So rooms next to each other weren't numbered in the order, as you might expect. On top of that, planners started using different numbering systems, adding and removing punctuation so that some rooms ended up with several different but slightly varying numbers. And at some point, they simply ran out of numbers. The room number system is incorrect. For example, on the third floor, there aren't enough numbers for all the necessary places. Now all rooms have to be re-numbered, which is a very difficult job. But in that said, on April 2, 2014. If you've landed at Shonafeld Airport in recent years, you will have almost certainly seen the B.E.R. terminal. You can't help but notice it, because it seemed every light in the building is blazing away 24 hours a day. You might wonder why an empty, unfinished airport needs to be constantly illuminated. One reason was presented by Mr. Horst Arman, one of B.E.R.'s technical managers. Here's what he told a meeting of a Berlin Business Association in February 2013. The lights are burning day and night out there. That's because we haven't progressed far enough with the controlling technology so that we can turn them off. To be fair, at other times, the airport company FBB has claimed that the lights are constantly on for safety and security reasons. But they've never addressed Mr. Arman's public statement. If what he said wasn't true, they haven't corrected it. If it was true, they haven't explained whether they've fixed it yet. When Uran and I went out to the airport not long ago, the lights were certainly blazing bright. Well, all except for one. It seems like the lights might be kind of malfunctioning. Despite it on the top of the roof that are flashing for no particular reason. Is that like a test of an emergency system of some kind? I'm quite sure we just spotted the next B.E.R. delay. What are those lights flashing for? There's no reason why they should be turning them off. They're turning arrow planes not to land here, maybe? Secret code. Okay, so it's pretty easy for us to sit here today and poke fun at the B.E.R. planners and all their mistakes. It's a lot harder to commit yourself to actually fixing them up. So what was it like for the workers who were called in to correct the 150,000 errors discovered at B.E.R. in the wake of that landmark, 2012 cancellation? Well, here's someone who can give us an insider's perspective. This project was a new bar and new construction. It never got in to operate. It's being old, to be operative. And then we had to renovate, reconstruct a new building. This was the absolute thing as well. And as everybody on the sector knows that the reconstruction renovation is always more difficult. That's why it's always more expensive as well. This is Marco. That's not his real name. He wants to protect his professional reputation. Marco worked as an engineer on the site at B.E.R. for two years as part of a team, called in to fix the airport after that first major delay. The first job they had to do was an audit of the state of the building and document all outstanding tasks. I think by the time that they entered there were 80,000 plants only for their building. We were given partly some plants of 2005, 2004 or something. And it was the index zero. I mean, where there was like index 15 or something, so many changes in the same part of the building. And besides that, they were like other plants made from the company exactly for the mounting, mounting plants that we never got in our hands. So we were going there and we have to see what we have in our hands as plants and what was already their built. It wasn't so well organized so we didn't get the plants that we should in the end, to validate or identify and they make a lot of changes in the uses of the airport. Like in the beginning, the planning of the airport was okay and everything. And then suddenly they put 600 subs inside. So after putting 600 subs inside, the use of the place is still very different. So the requirements for fire protection as well are very different. Despite the difficulty of constructing a new building inside the shell of an old one, Marco started the job full of enthusiasm. He and his co-workers were going to save the airport. The positivity didn't last for long. In the beginning, of course, there was again a lot of motivation and stuff. We saw it like that we're going to save the problem and we're going to keep the airport as soon as possible. We're going to find identified straight away all the problems. We started there to see that it's so chaotic. It's hard to move something over there. You know the problem, you know exactly what it is. And you asked for a solution this could take so long. I think a lot of people lost the motivation and seen just a small progress or nothing of progress, almost hardly progress. And I think it'd be frustrating mostly for young people. There were many old people there, mostly of them. They were close to they to get to rent into five years to go to rent. Some of them were already to rent. So these people in a way in hell don't have to show up or to give big experience. I don't say they're not good engineers. They have amazing experience. But for instance, these people are not good with the IT. You don't have to use a lot of IT. But you could help like in our case. When Marco says of enter here he's talking about retirement. The old engineers were counting down their remaining days. The young ones saw no reason to try hard. Since it was clear their overtime hours would be spent in vain. If you want to do nothing it was relatively easy. If you want to do a lot, you could try. Of course you're not going to see the same results. If you're not working in the private sector. But yes, of course you can get obsessed and do some months. And a lot of times your job is going in vain. I saw this as well. I saw people working 10 hours, 11 hours really working. But I know that nobody followed it all the way down. In the end the plant changes again. The biggest problem was the total lack of control. It's public building. So you're boss actually. It's kind of virtual. You don't have somebody to be exactly your boss. And the other side is always. Nobody wants to waste his money. So everybody is controlling if he's going to get what he is in the contract. But there I. I said because the boss is a public. It's like somebody, a virtual, you never see him. It was like they end up losing tons of money. So they were very relaxed. The companies were earning money with taxes. That means like I give you an engineer. And you are giving me $1,800 or $1,500. It depends on the position of my engineer. So long as the engineer is there. I got together money. But there's nobody to say if my engineer is doing wealthiest job. So there was no controlling processes inside. The target sets he's talking about here. That's the floating daily rates that contractors were paid after the fixed price contracts were abandoned. On top of general laziness, Mako said it was well known on site that workers were making money by stealing copper and selling it off site. For instance, many people were doing business out of it. So with cutting cables and selling in the market and ever getting money per kilo for good far for instance. And it can be not a bad deal. Like if you're a worker there and you go all the way back back. And every day you fulfill it with 3, 4 kilos, 5. And you go out of the product, nobody's controlling you. This was confirmed by a report in the build newspaper that said that more than 200 property thefts had been recorded on site at the BER between 2012 and 2013. In the end, Mako left out of fear that the BER would be bad for his CV. Personally, I had the fear that it could not be a good reference for me anymore working over there. And a project like that is one of the first more problematic ever big projects in Germany and Europe. So I thought it was dangerous for me to stay so long over there. Here's something to think about. When BER opens, if BER opens, it will already be an old new airport. This is going to be from the beginning like already an old airport. They're going to manage to open an airport of like 15 years old and the college is something. And this was the last opening. They have to modernize again. Because they're not the anymore it's old stuff. The new airports are already building in a different way. Coming up in a minute, it's time for somebody to take responsibility. This podcast series and Radio Shbeatcast's regular shows are made possible thanks to some very special listeners who make a monthly donation via our website. It's not a huge amount, but it's enough to let us know that people appreciate what we're doing. Thanks for the support. It really means a lot to us. If you want us to keep making podcasts like this, visit radioshbeatcast.com and click donate. We're using this series to shine a light on some of our favorite Berlin cultural projects. You should already be familiar with this next one since you hear their work every time you listen to Radio Shbeatcast. The band Ducks produce all our jingles and music. Those beats and melodies in the background, they're created by Craig Schufton, Lani Bagley and their collaborators. Ducks have released two albums, one called Ding Ding Ding and more recently Naak Naak. You normally only hear their instrumental work on our show, but their albums contain the mesmerizing vocals of Lani and Craig's occasional deep rumbling spoken word. I hope we hear even more of Craig on the next one. Here's a little sample of one of my favorite songs, Night and Day. Ducks play regularly around Berlin and sometimes head home for gigs in Australia too. They put on a fantastic live show. They're regulars out of the mobile Kino summer camp. Go buy their album, catch a gig and become a fan like me. Search for Ducks Make Music and don't forget the exclamation mark. Ducks. Ducks. Fuck up, number 22. Fire the only people who know what's going on. After the embarrassing June 2012 opening cancellation, the airport supervisory board held an emergency meeting. The board was headed by Berlin Mayor Klaus Vorweright and made up mostly of other state and federal politicians who suddenly found themselves under enormous pressure. For years, no one had paid any attention to the Berlin Airport project. Now everyone wanted to know why it had failed so dramatically. The politicians weren't about to offer themselves up as responsible parties. They claimed no one had told them about the impending disaster. Likewise, the airport CEO, Rainish Farts, said he wasn't to blame. He pointed fingers down the chain of command. At that meeting, the FBB board made two resolutions. One, they set a new opening date roughly one year away. Two, they cancelled the contract of one of the many subcontractors working on the airport. That company was called PG-BBI and it was a joint venture between architect Meinhard von Gerkensbüro and another architectural company. PG-BBI had been involved in planning the airport since the mid-2000s. They employed 170 staff, including architects and engineers. It was their job to design all the blueprints and obtain all the building permits. But they were also awarded a second contract. They were hired to review the designs and supervise the progress. So effectively, they were hired to make the plans and to check the plans. They were marking their own homework. Many critics have pointed to the firing of PG-BBI in May 2012 as the start of the second phase of chaos at BER. While it could be argued that they'd made mistakes, they were also the one company with the most detailed knowledge of the entire project. Instead of being fired, they could have been forced to clean up the mess, at their own cost perhaps. But on the day their contract was cancelled, PG-BBI left the airport project, which affected all work on the ground at BER. This shutdown and the loss of key personnel, who knew where the bodies were buried, set the entire BER project back by years, according to some. Here's Martin Dalius, who was head of the Berlin Parliamentary Inquiry into the BER. It was a mistake to kick them out so shortly after the crash in 2012, because they were the only institution within the whole project who had at least a slight overview of what was going on. They gave all their documents over to the FB. There was nothing left, but they had the people doing the documentary, doing the archives, doing all the controlling. They had them keep to themselves. They don't give them away to the FB. So no one was there who was familiar with all those documents and the FB lost a lot of time after kicking out the PG-BBI in terms of planning and reorganizing and seeing what the project can do and what the problems are. By firing PG-BBI, the airport effectively also fired the architect, Main Hart von Gerkahn, and turned him into one of their most vocal critics. It also resulted in this embarrassment. Hundreds of BER files found in the trash, be it set, June 23, 2014. A dumpster diver in the Berlin District of Lichtenberg found hundreds of folders containing thousands of pages of records about BER. It included detailed architectural blueprints, technical plans, and general organizational documents. The dumpster was located in the same street as the former office of PG-BBI, which went bankrupt following its ouster from the BER project. At the time, the local press got worked up about this, presenting it as a security risk for the airport. The police were even called in. But really, given the state of the fire safety system, an evil-doer would hardly need access to the blueprints to cause a bit of chaos out at BER. The second head to roll at BER was Manfred Kurtken. He was the airport's technical manager until June 2012, when he was fired by the supervisory board. Kurtken was responsible for all technical aspects of the airport, well basically all the bits that failed the most. But somehow, alongside this very critical role, he had found time to write a dissertation and obtain a PhD at the University of Kassel. His 200-page thesis had the page-turning title of. "Uptimisation techniques for process-oriented handling of complex construction projects using new information and communication systems." The man who'd overseen BER's problem-riddled technical systems wrote a thesis about how to manage construction projects. This could have been quite an instructive case study, since failure sometimes leads to learning. But there's no soul-searching in Kurtken's thesis. Instead, it delivers such insights as. "The medium of the internet is ideal for the corporation of heterogeneous project teams, since they can be organised independent of time and location." Too bad this internet innovation wasn't usable on the construction site, since the land system wasn't stable. Also unfortunate that many of the subcontractors refused to use the software set up to catalog and manage all of the construction problems. Shortly after Kurtken received his PhD, staff at BER received an email, instructing them to start addressing him as a doctor. In the run-up to the failed 2012 opening ceremony, as staff were desperately attempting to communicate their extreme concerns internally, they received another instruction. "How Dr. Kurtken wishes that the word "extremely" is removed from controlling reports, March 22, 2012." Right up until the dramatic cancellation, Kurtken was reporting positive progress. In late April, he told the media that the BER's fire safety system was functioning, which would be proven untrue. Later, he told the Berlin Parliamentary Inquiry into BER that he wasn't responsible for the problems. He blamed another subcontractor, called WSP, which was in charge of project management. Rainer Schwarz managed to hold on to his job for quite a long time after the fateful June 2012 cancellation. The CEO who had been in charge of the FBB Airport company since groundwork began successfully blamed those beneath him for all the chaos. He later told the Parliamentary Inquiry that his job was to run Berlin's two existing airports, Tegel and Schoenerfeld, and not to organise daily work on the building site. "The building of BER was not my job. I had no responsibility for the technical things in the company. Naturally, I'm not interested to get every little bit of detailed information." But it was Schwarz who had authorised all the major planning changes that led to the catastrophe. Like Kurtken, he claimed everything was running fine, right up until it became obvious that nothing was running at all. Here's what he wrote in the company's 2011 annual review. Schwarz survived the immediate aftermath of the cancellation and oversaw the firing of various subcontractors and his deputy, Dr. Manfred Kurtken. It wasn't until one year later, June 2013, that his contract was cancelled. Exactly why it took so long as a mystery. Perhaps he had convinced the supervisory board that he really wasn't responsible. There are other indications that the board was worried about firing too many people too quickly and didn't want to upset operations at the other airports. But when they finally decided to give Schwarz his notice of termination, they somehow managed to mess up the paperwork. They wrote a contract cancellation letter which stated Schwarz was fired for not delivering required information to the supervisory board. But Schwarz fired back. He sued for wrongful termination of his contract. In October 2014, a Berlin court ruled in favour of Schwarz. The court found that the airport company had waited too long to dismiss Schwarz for not reporting problems. If they had concerns, they should have acted within two weeks instead of months. Schwarz was awarded damages totaling 1 million, 26,860 euros and 37 cents. Here's Martin Dalius. The company, the FBB, had to pay Rhino Schwarz his whole bonuses and the remaining contract payments in full. He was the most intriguing, arrogant and most complicated witness at the whole board. He was so ignorant to the board. Before the board to every issue we asked them that we needed to pause the meeting and think about suing him for not answering all questions. Because he was really unwilling and after I told him if you're not telling us anything, if you're ignoring the legitimacy of the board, of the inquiry committee, we have to take legal action against you. We are able and we are forced by the Constitution of Berlin to do so. He played a bit of a nice guy role, not saying anything at all, but at least answering the questions which he didn't do before that. I read some news reports from the time he was announced the new CEO of the FBB. And the papers were full of his and accomplished manager, his experience, good thing, nice, let's try that. And for a long time it worked, for a long time, or until 2012, nobody had something to criticize him about. How he was able to not doing his job on those years, I'm really not sure. Since leaving BER, Rainish Schwarz has continued to work in the airport business, he was soon hired as head of Rostock Lager Airport. And in 2017, he took over as CEO at Munster Hosnerbrook Airport. We asked Schwarz for an interview. He responded almost immediately. He said no. Many thanks for your request. Due to my contractual obligation of non-disclosure, I am not available for questions regarding BER. Best regards, Professor Dr. Rainer Schwarz. Fuck up, number 25. Hostinorgy of Corporate Crime. So far, the story of the BER disaster has been one of incompetence and mismanagement. But now it takes a twist towards the dark side of human nature. It's time to talk about corruption. Our insider Marco already told us about workers stealing copper wire. But that was petty thievery compared to the graft going on higher up the food chain. Corruption at BER. Okay, next up. Corruption at BER. X-Technical Boss Sentenced. Stand by good scene, October 27, 2014. Jochen Glossmann was a well-regarded engineer brought into BER to fix the hugely problematic monster smoke ventilation system in 2013. Instead, he got busy trying to get rich. As a court later heard, Jochen Glossmann demanded a personal payment of half a million euros from a Dutch company called Arcades that was trying to get a contract to work at BER. Here's how it would have worked. He told Arcades to increase its offer from 1.3 million to 1.8 million. The extra half a million should have been then paid to Glossmann's own company for unnecessary services. A few days after this, Glossmann recommended to the airport company that they accept the inflated offer from Arcades, which they did. But Arcades later told the airport what was going on and the bill was reduced back down to the original price, so Glossmann never got his kickback. Instead, he was charged with fraud and corruption. He faced court over the Arcades case, as well as other incidents in which he had overbilled the airport company by a total of 54,000 euros. In October 2014, Glossmann was given a one-year suspended prison sentence and fined 200,000 euros. Former BER manager says, "I was paid 150 grand at a parking lot." Be it set, August 23, 2016. The engineering company ImTech was one of the most important subcontractors on site at BER. They were responsible for installing the electricity, heating and fire safety systems, including ventilation ducts and sprinklers. Yes, all the things that went wrong. In late 2012, ImTech was in financial trouble. They were waiting desperately for the airport company to pay a huge number of outstanding invoices. Into the story comes a man named Francis G, whose last name has to be obscured for legal reasons. Francis G was the former manager of building and planning at the airport company FBB, with direct power to authorise payments. ImTech wanted its money and quickly. Instead of going through the normal procedure, Francis G proposed a quicker solution, a single unordered payment of 60,000,000 euros. But he wanted something in exchange. His starting price was 2 million euros. ImTech managed to haggle the bribe down to 150,000 euros. The money was exchanged at a highway rest stop, as Francis G later admitted to a court. In 2016, he was found guilty of corruption and sentenced to three years and eight months in prison. Several employees of ImTech were given suspended sentences. The court case also drew out some insights about what it was like for the subcontractors working at BER. Klaus B from the company ImTech told the court. BER was our biggest and most problematic construction project. The client couldn't submit any plans. There was confusion, absolute chaos. It was like being in a big city where the traffic lights suddenly fell. Everyone knew that the opening date was unrealistic. Despite the corruption case, ImTech continued to work on the BER project up until it went bankrupt in 2016. Which threw another spanner in the works. The corruption came to light after an anonymous tip-off. Here's what happens to suspected informers at BER. Poison attack on BER engineer. Built April 30, 2016. Build reported that an engineer fell ill shortly after the investigation inter-corruption began. Doctors believed the man had been poisoned. They suspect a deadly substance had been added to his coffee while at his office at the BER construction site. There were no specific suspects. Over a dozen people had access to the office. How could so much extravagant corruption take place in good old rule abiding honest Germany? Well, our insider Marco has an interesting theory about that. He says it's precisely because Germany isn't so used to corruption. To do strange, because normally like big country with the best economy in the Europe and stuff, then nobody don't have problems of corruption or washing money or stealing public money. Nobody could go there to make investigation or even a journalist or a couple of important or not important people. And for other countries that have like the etiquette of way more corrupted and all this, this could never gonna happen like to be so silent and so long, something is spending their public money and nothing happening for their commonwealth. And not to be big issue there in the news. And not to be really big investigations and not to judge some more people they find a couple, but maybe they can, you cannot justify all the lost money with this couple of people, you know? Fuck up number 26. Make sure your experts have no expertise. It wasn't even necessary to commit crimes at the BR site to get undeserved benefits. It seems you could just show up with a fancy business card and get yourself an important job. No questions asked. Alfredo Di Mauro is the manager of a company with the word engineering in its title. His business card carried the title Diploma Engineer. On this basis, he was hired to work on the Monster Ventilation System. Yes, I know again the monster. In 2014, Stern magazine revealed that Di Mauro had no qualifications as an engineer. Rather, he was a trained technical draftsman. He was fired, not for faking his credentials, but for the failure of his ventilation system. At the parliamentary inquiry, Di Mauro said he believed he was actually fired because he kept presenting the airport company with uncomfortable information. In late 2012, he carried out simulations that showed the pressure ratios inside the smoke extraction channels were so extreme they might implode. But he says the airport company destroyed the documents. If correct, they would mean that the whole ventilation system has to be replaced, making even the most optimistic opening date impossible. And about those qualifications, here's what Di Mauro told a local Berlin radio station. They all took me to be an engineer. I never corrected them. No one ever asked to see my degree. There wasn't necessary for a work. Sclerario June 24, 2014. His work, just as a reminder, was to plan the smoke extraction system that has been one of the primary causes of the endless delays at BER. Ladies and gentlemen, we have made a slight adjustment to our opening date from March 2013 until October 2013. And we have made your bill now, 4.3 billion euro. Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to slide to that opening date forward till 2014. No longer even a bearist to admit it, but we're just going to put your new bill at 4.6 billion. All right, listeners, we've been bombarding you with facts and playing a bit with a timeline to try and help things make sense. But let's now go through some important events chronologically. Following the major cancellation of June 2012, which was itself the second cancellation, the opening date was shifted twice more as the scale of the disaster became apparent, and key staff kept getting fired. After BER's fourth official delay, several key things happened. First, Klaus Forverite stepped down as head of the FBB Supervisory Board, but remained mayor. He was replaced by Brandenburg Minister President Matthias Platzek. Second, Reiner Schwarz was dismissed as company CEO. He was replaced by a man with a reputation as a hard-headed problem solver. His name, Hartmut Merdorn. In the German corporate world, this guy was a big deal. Merdorn had previously been head of Deutsche Bahn for ten years, and had overseen the complicated construction of Berlin's Helped Bahnhof, or Main Station. He then took over Air Berlin and ran the airline from 2011 until 2013. Interestingly, as CEO of Air Berlin, Merdorn sued the BER airport company for 48 million euros of lost revenue caused by the multiple delays, a case that continued after he moved to the airport. In the end, Air Berlin got just 2 million euros and later went bankrupt. Hartmut Merdorn was specifically called in by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had finally weighed in on the country's most embarrassing public project, one in which her government was a 26% shareholder. Merkel sent him a personal message through one of her confidence. How made on? Please finish it. Der Spieger, July 2017. Merdorn's first major overhaul on the BER site was his own office. He ordered new chairs, white ones for his guests, and a large red one for himself. He then reorganised project management into so-called Sprints, which is a term that should be familiar to anyone who's ever worked in a startup. A Sprint is a fixed period of time, during which a set of things have to get done. It's one thing to run a startup and build an app. It's quite another to reconstruct a new airport inside the booby-trap shell of an old airport. After less than one year sitting in his red chair and under pressure from the politicians on the supervisory board, Hartmut Merdorn quit as CEO. Martin Delius has a few ideas. Why? I think Hartmut Merdorn was asked to be head of FBB for a specific reason. I think he, the FBB needed, and that was right, needed someone, a strong leader, to argue with the companies, which the FBB owed money. A lot of money, like 800 million to 1.5 billion euros at that time, 2013. He needed to solve those money issues, those open bills, not paid bills, which he didn't do. So, after a time, he needed to go. As well, there was another reason, of course, he argued and blamed the board of oversight for almost everything that didn't work out. Which is a stupid thing to do as a CEO of a company with a board of oversight. Because the board of oversight can always freeze or strike out your contract. Merdorn was replaced by Kasten Mullenfeld, a former boss of Rolls Royce Germany, who fared little better. The airport's third CEO lasted less than two years on the job. Ladies and gentlemen, 2014 opening, that's not going to happen. Not that you're surprised, but maybe it's your fault for not believing in us. We'll just be adjusting your bill up to 4.7 billion. Finally, we are getting to the most significant political consequence of the BER debacle so far. There's up until now, despite years of delays and billions in budget overruns, not one politician has faced any serious ramifications for the enormous waste of public finances. But, in August 2014, the one politician who had most influenced the entire BER project finally took a bow. I have today told the Berlin Senate that I will not be standing as a candidate for mayor in the next election. And secondly, that on September 11th, sorry, December 11th, too early, I will make aid in the office of mayor. Klaus Wolverite, August 8th, 2014. Wolverite had been Berlin's ruling mayor for 13 years. With an election coming up, he chose to leave on his own terms before voters had a chance to decide whether to hold him responsible for the debacle of BER. From his own perspective, Wolverite felt he carried no blame at all for what had gone wrong at the airport. He called the BER delay his most bitter disappointment, but said he left office with a positive balance. Here's what Wolverite told the parliamentary inquiry. I never received any information that the opening date couldn't be met. The problem was that the specifications of the airport changed over time. Perhaps the planners had said too late that too many changes were being made. And even more recently, Wolverite has maintained his blamelessness. The supervisory board doesn't run the business, and they don't tighten the screws themselves either. I made one mistake. I believe that the supervisory board could control everything. But the board can't do anything against the management. Zontag Stammtisch, Bärischer Rundfunk, April 23, 2017. Wolverite has consistently claimed that the airport management didn't inform him about the mounting problems. The former CEO Reiner Schwarz says otherwise. But whether or not he knew there were problems, Wolverite certainly played a part in creating problems. It was Wolverite who scrapped the planned privatization of the airport construction back in 2003, as we heard in our first episode. That forced the airport company FBB to do it themselves with terrible results. Wolverite personally ordered many of the major changes during construction, including the additional two gates to handle the giant Airbus A380 planes. As head of the supervisory board, he signed off on all of the major alterations. And Wolverite rushed to cancel the contract of PG-BBI, the planning subcontractor, which then took their detailed knowledge and threw it in a dumpster, figuratively and physically. He also fired the CEO Reiner Schwarz, but left it too late, resulting in his 1 million euro payout. Was Wolverite personally to blame for the whole B.E. Architastrophe? No, this disaster has had many masters, but he played a larger role than most and never really faced up to the fact. Perhaps the most serious outcome for Wolverite is that unlike at the start of his career, no one's talking about his potential to become German Chancellor anymore. On a related note, a year prior to Wolverite's departure, the Minister President of Brandenburg Matthias Platzick resigned, citing unspecified health reasons. B.E.R. had seen the end of two state leaders. We're going on a tour of all four of Berlin's under-construction, out-of-use, falling apart and over-capacity airports, from B.E.R. to Tempohof to Tegel and Schunnerfeld. Because all of them have had a part to play in the story of how Berlin fucked up an airport. No politician, no airport director and no human being that isn't addicted to prescription drugs will give you a solid guarantee for this airport. On the next episode of How to Fuck Up an Airport. This series is a production of Radio Spadecalf and Radio Eins. It's produced by me, Joel Delroy, with Maisie Hitchcock, Johann Mandik and Daniel Stern. We've drawn on several key sources for all of the facts, including the 2016 Berlin Parliamentary Inquiry. There's Spiegel's article made in Germany from August 2017, Rhiner During's book Lachnummer B.E.R., various newspaper articles, TV footage and radio reports, as well as our own interviews with original sources. Special thanks to the Ben Ducks for our music and to Jim Avignon for the podcast artwork. For more Berlin news in English, visit the Radio Spadecalf archive at radiospadecalf.com. - You should be cool. - You should be cool.