The THTR Circulars from 2002

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THTR Circular No. 77 Nov. 2002

Another 11 years of tax relief
for THTR operators!

Details remain secret

After the TAZ report about a partial tax exemption for the THTR operating company HKG (see THTR-RB 74 and 75), we put the following questions to the NRW state government:

1. Has the operating company paid taxes in the past?

2. Has HKG received a partial tax exemption in the past? In which extensive?

3. Is the state government of the opinion that the THTR Hamm-Uentrop was or is "significant" for the energy supply or energy policy of North Rhine-Westphalia and that this is the prerequisite for a lower tax payment?

4. Does the state government see or see in the past the need to give other bodies concerned with the partial tax exemption a different, own point of view?

5. Is the tax exemption already legally binding?

6. Why was the partial tax exemption granted until 2009?

The Ministry of Economy and Medium-Sized Enterprises, Technology and Transport of the State of NW replied:

"With your letter, referring to an alleged communication (Welch ein Deutsch !, THTR-RB) in the 'taz - die tageszeitung' of February 7, 2, you are requesting information about the tax treatment of Hoch Temperatur-Kernkraftwerk GmbH as a joint European company .

As you should know, the THTR plant has been shut down for years and partially dismantled. In particular, the fuel elements have been removed from the power plant, so that the plant can no longer be of any importance for the energy supply of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (see question 3 of your letter). The remaining facility has been in safe enclosure since October 1997.

In retrospect, it can be stated that the technology of the pebble-bed high-temperature reactor, due to its development potential and proven safety properties (just think of the many, many accidents ..., THTR-RB), in particular in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, was once associated with great expectations of use. As known, the development was canceled (why probably ?, THTR-RB). The state government supports the federal government in its efforts to end the generation of electricity from nuclear energy in an orderly manner. This also requires an orderly remainder of the THTR.

Since your questions mainly concern tax law issues, your letter has been forwarded to the state finance ministry for an answer. "

Signed Wilfried Hohmann, September 13, 9

Comment:

When citizens "request" information on an "alleged communication" from the ministry, they are only given what they "should be known" anyway. Even the emphatically condescending and weird language of expression is well known and proves nothing other than the correctness of the requirement for German exams, even for residents. And if we have given the ministerial bureaucracy the liberating feeling of happiness of being able to pass our request on to another department, at least we still have to answer question no. Or is that asking too much?

The Ministry of Finance NW writes:

"The tax concessions under the Euratom Treaty referred to in your letter were already the subject of a small question from the Member of Parliament Dr. Manfred Busch (Die Grünen) - Landtag printed matter 1993/11 / 5589 of 28. 6. 1993, question 11 'Which types of taxes relate to the benefits mentioned in the annual report and how high were the corresponding tax losses for the years 5762, 7 and 7?' Was answered as follows: 'The ones in question Tax concessions are based on the legal basis contained in Article 1993 of the Euratom Treaty, for so-called 'Joint Undertakings', the exemptions detailed in Annex III Number 5 of the Treaty are to be adopted. 1990, published in the Official Journal of the EC No. L 1991/1992. For the types of tax concerned and the details, reference is made to Article 48 of the referred to the decision. Further information on the actual use of the possible exemptions and the associated tax losses are not possible due to tax secrecy. '

By decision of the Council of the EC of May 7, 5, the status of a joint undertaking for the high-temperature nuclear power plant GmbH (HKG) was extended by 2002 years (cf. the publication in the Official Journal of the EC L 11/123).

Answering your further specific questions about the specific tax treatment of the HKG is opposed to the obligation of the tax authorities to maintain tax secrecy (Section 30 of the Tax Code) - which has already been pointed out in the aforementioned LT printed matter. "

Signed Hans-Georg Grigat, September 25, 9

Comment:

The HKG and the RWE (formerly VEW) have collected several billion DM in public money for the construction of the THTR and can therefore keep secret tax matters for decades and avoid tax payments. Dubious EC directives make it possible and unfortunately the red-green finance ministry cannot change anything! Where is the public control then?

For some time now we have been approached by various Internet users about a longer article by the alternative news agency "Indymedia", which not only deals with the "super scandal" at the Grohnde nuclear power plant, but also with alleged or actual irregularities in security checks in the THTR in the first half of the 80s goes.

Before Indymedia put the letter from the former Quality Assurance (QA) Michael N. from Hameln online, the news agency sent the following comment in advance: "The witness, without journalistic help, put the processes he had experienced on paper from his memory, there are minor mix-ups over time In view of the period, the technical details are also written from the point of view of a non-physicist, who only became fully aware of the scope of his experiences with the Castor debate. "

Among other things, the 16-page paper says:

"Making quality was not seen at the Grohnde NPP and later at the THTR Schmehausen construction site. There were days on which I was dismissed up to four times without notice, even though I did my job properly. My activities at the Grohnde NPP included:

- Transfer of weld seams from welding reports to coordination lists for inspectors

- Determination of the scope of testing for auditors

- Tracking of repairs to welds

- Site inspection, on-site inspections

Kraftanlagen AG, Heidelberg, had major problems with the welding shop and in the area of ​​quality assurance and certainly other companies as well.

If the QA discovered a welder who had problems working, he explained where he had welded everything and the construction management then went to the QA. If you found a defective weld seam in requirement level 2 or 3, the films were thrown away. It was X-rayed during the day without any barriers. The workers walked in front of the X-ray machine during the X-ray. (...) If a defective weld could not be repaired, the process was passed on to the Krönung / Wilde site managers and QA Karrer at Kraftanlagen AG, Heidelberg, Grohnde construction site. After 2-3 days, the case came back to quality assurance. Outwardly, the minutes and films were fine. Everyone in QA knew the logs and films were wrong. This practice was commonly called 'healthy praying' and was more common. It was an open secret in the area of ​​the assembly management and in the area of ​​quality assurance that there was someone on the construction site of the Grohnde NPP who created test documents. (...)

On April 1, 4, I switched to Werner Lorenz, the WELO company, at that time in Hambühren. I became quality assurance / documentation at the THTR Schmehausen nuclear power plant. The employees of the Hubert Schulte company, Grohnde construction site all switched to the THTR Schmehausen nuclear power plant. After a short time, the property manager Jürgen Reissberg and the site manager Achim Lenz operated the same system as at the Grohnde NPP. The construction managers of the BBC Mannheim were on the payroll at Hubert Schulte. The invoices were not written according to expenditure, but according to the customer's account balances. Billing was carried out as usual via the company Petcovice, Industriemontagen, Essen. The material documentation was extremely dubious. Here, too, Jürgen Reissberg did 'business' that simply only needed a public prosecutor. (...)

The construction site at the THTR nuclear power plant was finished for me in December 1984 "(...)

Although the text is quite extensive with 16 pages, it is noticeable that the assertions of the quality assurance company at the time are quite generalized in many places, so that it is often difficult to assess its credibility. It should be noted, of course, that the memory can pale after almost two decades. But what if the long report of the witness had been written out of a grudge against his former employer and superior (as it sounds in several places) and here only a certain subjective statement was made public?

Anyone can use indymedia to disseminate their statements and opinions unchecked. As a result, for example, right-wing anti-Semites and Islamic fundamentalists at Indymedia Switzerland used the pages of this alternative news agency for their own purposes, which has led to some turmoil.

We have to be precise and serious in our criticism of nuclear power. In some cases, this may not be the case with the quality inspector quoted above. When he writes, "Some time later I even saw children playing with fuel elements in the village of Hamm-Uentrop", with this assertion he devalues ​​other parts of his report that may be worth considering. Because: Since he stopped working at the THTR at the end of 1984 and the heat testing and power testing operation did not begin until 1985, it could hardly have been radioactively contaminated spherical fuel elements, but at most "demonstration balls" as they were passed around at various VEW lectures .

The information service "Environment-Communal ecological letters" reported on June 26, 6 about a conference of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in preparation for the sustainability summit in Johannisburg. The following assessment by Michaele Hustedt, energy policy spokeswoman for the Greens in the Bundestag, was given: "In the meantime, even former supporters of the nuclear phase-out are returning with small ones High temperature reactors and challenged with fusion energy. The argument is still to come. Hustedt was confirmed in this assessment by Christoph Bals from Germanwatch. "

In the federal election, Laurenz Meyer, as a CDU direct candidate in the constituency of Hamm-Unna II, received only 35,5 percent of the vote. That was significantly less than could be expected at the current level of political discourse in Hamm. The trumpeting of the right slogans at the regular table didn't pay off for the CDU general this time. However, he still comes to the Bundestag via the state list. Dieter Wiefelspütz, who visited nuclear-critical demonstrators in front of the gates of the THTR in the 80s, received an impressive 54,3 percent of the vote.

The publisher Dirk Ippen not only owns "Merkur" and "tz" in Munich, as well as countless regional newspapers in Germany, but also the "Westfälischer Anzeiger" in Hamm. The publisher, who already uses his newspapers as right-wing fight papers (WA title on March 29, 3: "Castor in the Blockade Terror"), has got into talk about new expansion plans.

The advertising market for the large, renowned "Süddeutsche Zeitung", which has recently been launched with a section from North Rhine-Westphalia, is collapsing. It is slipping deeper and deeper into the red, so that a new co-partner is being sought. "Focus" from October 14, 10 reports: "More likely the new investor is the Munich publisher Dirk Ippen. After numerous acquisitions, Ippen now publishes more than a million newspapers nationwide every day - and it is highly profitable. Ippen, the same in the industry Economical as well as fussy, could tap the greatest savings potential through synergies in the greater Munich area. And: A 2002 percent stake of Süddeutscher Verlag in the publishing group Münchner Merkur creates a common basis. " You don't need to develop a great imagination to imagine what will happen to the relatively tolerant and cosmopolitan SZ when Ippen has a decisive influence on this newspaper. We have to read it every day in Hamm.

In the board meeting on September 16, the district board of the trade union ver.di Südhessen strongly criticized the proposals of the Hartz commission and unanimously called on the DGB to withdraw its support for the Hartz plans.

"Reason: The Hartz Commission's plans are the worst attack on the rights of workers and the unemployed in post-war Germany. They are an attempt to divert attention from the crisis of capitalism and to portray the unemployed as the cause of unemployment. It is cynical if this leads to one The moment comes when there are officially four million unemployed (another million are not in the statistics) almost 500.000 vacancies, unemployment rises due to the recession and entrepreneurs announce the destruction of jobs on a large scale in order to optimize profits. (...)

The planned reduction in unemployment benefits from 40 to 13,2 billion marks a year with simultaneous subsidization of wage costs for entrepreneurs is a gigantic redistribution from bottom to top. It is a foray by the entrepreneurs on the unemployment insurance contributions earned by the wage earners, true to the motto: 'The costs of labor must continue to fall'.

The attempt to turn the unemployed into completely unlawful objects of a forced labor market and thereby to adjust the unemployment statistics by two million by 2005 leads to enormous pressure on the employees. Their jobs come under massive competition from the inevitable low-cost providers of human labor, an army of temporary workers, bogus self-employed and publicly subsidized applicants. The Hartz plans are therefore an attack on all employees and not just on the unemployed.

The Hartz Commission's proposals are:

+ an interference with collective bargaining autonomy,

+ an interference in the operational capacity of the trade unions,

+ shifting the classic entrepreneurial risk to employees, the unemployed and the employment office,

+ an additional burden on unemployed workers, workers and their families,

+ A deregulation of the protective provisions of the Temporary Employment Act and the associated total temporary work.

Against this background, it is a scandal that the leadership of the DGB and individual trade unions have declared their fundamental support for the Commission's plans. The Hartz plans cannot be improved, they must be rejected and fought against and stopped with all necessary means. Trade unions are there to represent the interests of their members and not to work together with government and companies to pursue capitalist crisis management at the expense of employees and the unemployed. "

Aus: "Express - newspaper for socialist company and trade union work", issue 9, 40th year, PO Box 10 20 63, 63020 Offenbach

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