The corona pandemic also caught Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania unprepared. To cope with the social and economic consequences, the country took on debts of a hitherto unknown amount. The state audit office took a closer look at the MV protection fund.
Schwerin (dpa/mv) - The multi-billion dollar MV protection fund to deal with the corona pandemic is illegal according to the state audit office in Schwerin. Many of the measures financed with the emergency loans have no relation to the pandemic, the audit authority judges in a special report that has now been submitted. The debt brake that has been in force since 2020 will be undermined with the credit-financed special fund. In addition, it restricts Parliament's budgetary powers. "It's not a sound financial policy when there's such a large shadow budget," said Martina Johannsen, President of the Court of Auditors, when the almost 150-page audit report was presented.
In 2020, at the first peak of the pandemic, the country took on a total of 2.85 billion euros in new debt to deal with the consequences of the Corona crisis. In a supplementary budget, 700 million euros in credit authorizations were approved by the state parliament in spring, followed by a further 2.15 billion in winter. At the request of the opposition AfD parliamentary group, the state constitutional court in Greifwald is also dealing with the legality of the MV protection fund. A verdict is expected by the end of August.
"An emergency-related borrowing for the MV protection fund is legitimate," emphasized Johannsen. However, a factual and temporal reference of the planned measures to the respective emergency, in this case to the corona pandemic, must be recognizable. In addition, in principle only additional measures could be handled via the MV protection fund. This is demonstrably not the case for a large number of the projects, since they were already being planned.
As examples, Johannsen named the school construction program, for which 100 million euros are planned in the MV protection fund, the special fund for the university medicine in the amount of 360 million euros and the digitization package with a total volume of 400 million euros. For the larger projects at the schools, construction could begin by the end of 2024. "It is incomprehensible how this can be used to fight the pandemic," said Johannsen.
For the report, the Court of Auditors also examined the outflow of protection fund funds to date. Accordingly, by the end of April 2022, 1.64 billion of the 2.85 billion euros in credit authorizations had been used, but only 763 million euros of this was also spent on specific projects and economic aid. Johannsen took this as evidence that many of the planned measures were unrelated to the pandemic or that the money was not needed to the extent planned.
"If, after two and a half years of the pandemic, just a quarter of the Corona funds have gone out, there is no reason why three quarters are now needed to mitigate the consequences of the pandemic," said the President of the Court of Auditors. She warned the state government to only use the loans from the MV protection fund in justified cases and not to fully exhaust the agreed framework. "The fewer loans the country takes out, the less it has to repay. And that serves intergenerational equity," stressed Johannsen.
From 2025 onwards, the Corona loans are to be repaid. The state is planning 142 million euros a year for this.
