In the FRG there is the increasing development of the reactionarization of the bourgeois state. This also goes hand in hand with the development over many years that the powers of the executive, i.e. the government and the authorities, are being extended further and further and thus the power of the legislative and judiciary are being limited in order to concentrate the power in the bourgeois state in the hands of the executive.

One example of such a case is the current scandal involving the Green Party NRW Justice Minister Benjamin Limbach. After taking over the Ministry of Justice in North Rhine-Westphalia, Limbach allegedly stopped the appointment process for the presidency of the Münster Higher Administrative Court on his own authority in order to appoint his preferred candidate. Limbach's desired candidate is herself an employee in the North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of the Interior and, according to various media, was arbitrarily overrated by the Minister of Justice in his assessment so that he could place her in a controlled manner in the post of President for the Münster Higher Administrative Court. This farce has now come out because the Administrative Court of Münster, in summary proceedings brought forward by itself, forbade the state of Nordheim-Westphalia to appoint Limbach's preferred candidate as president. In the summary proceedings the responsible judges explain likewise that they regard Limbach's procedure as illegal and accuse him concretely of manipulative intervention into the process of the post assignment. The judges also added that Limbach had not had the right to write such an "over-evaluation" of his preferred candidate for external applicants from the very beginning.

In the usual manner of bourgeois politicians, the Minister of Justice himself denied any accusations and initially remained silent about the allegations. Now, however, under pressure from the SPD and FDP, who are in the opposition in North Rhine-Westphalia, Limbach was forced to speak out in a special session of the Legal Affairs Committee. In the special session, he denied any accusations of manipulation and referred to the fact that he would have the right to make such assessments due to a change in the law in 2022. However, he also had to admit that he knew his preferred candidate personally from their time together in court and that the two of them had discussed her application for the presidency at a dinner, whereby he subtly put the blame on her and testified that it was his candidate who had brought up the subject and that he had not treated her preferentially in any way afterwards.

If you believe it, you´re naive. Especially because Limbach is also in the spotlight of another judicial scandal in NRW in which he also interferes in the fate of the judiciary. Because only last week Limbach got into the headlines to split the main department H of the public prosecutor's office Cologne, which is responsible for the clearing-up and investigations approximately around the Cum-Ex business of chancellor and gangster boss Scholz in the complex with the Warburg bank into two departments. The result would be that the work of the present investigation leading senior public prosecutor Anne Brorhilker - which is considered in bourgeois circles of experts as renowned and persistent - would be handed half to a so far inexperienced public prosecutor.The new prosecutor was previously responsible for juvenile criminal law issues and would therefore have no experience with highly complex financial investigations. Limbach explained this step by saying that he wanted to relieve Brorhilker and make the investigations more efficient. In numbers this means that of the 1800 accused in the Cum-Ex-complex of which 1700 lie with the senior public prosecutor Brorhilker, 850 accused now become a matter of the new public prosecutor, who is appointed by the Minister of Justice Limbach. Here, too, Limbach, who is apparently not too good a liar, again gets entangled in contradictions. He recently gave an interview to the WDR political magazine Westpol in which he explained that he had not yet been told any precise plans regarding the measures to be taken by the acting head of the Cologne public prosecutor's office. However, this statement is in complete contradiction to an internal report of the General Public Prosecutor's Office in Cologne to the NRW Ministry of Justice, which is available to WDR. In this internal report which was transmitted at the beginning of of September to the Ministry of Justice, writes the general public prosecutor's office Cologne that the discussions over the restructuring of the main department H responsible for the Cum-Ex investigations directly between the North-Rhine/Westphalia Ministry of Justice and the public prosecutor's office Cologne were led over the heads of the general public prosecutor's office and that the planned change for an efficient continuation of the investigations is not meaningful and even the impression could develop that the splitting of the department is to obstruct the Cum-Ex investigations. Sharp words from the mouth of a leading representative of the German official bureaucratic apparatus. The staff representation of all public prosecutors and criminal prosecutors of North Rhine-Westphalia even followed up in an internal newsletter and wrote that there was suspicion that Limbach had deliberately concealed the essential processes of the reorganization of the main department.

Meanwhile, Limbach is also being targeted from a third front. Thus, for more than a year, bourgeois politicians from the Hamburg investigative committee on the Cum-Ex case have allegedly been sending requests to the NRW Ministry of Justice, asking Limbach and his ministry to make available to the aforementioned investigative committee emails from the inner circle of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, or more precisely his current head of the Chancellor's Office, Wolfgang Schmidt, and his former office manager. To date, all deadlines have passed and the data have not been sent to the investigative committee in Hamburg. Here, too, one lie after the next now falls to Limbach's feet. Thus he has shifted the blame for the dragging out of the data in question onto the Cologne public prosecutor's office and the senior public prosecutor Brorhilker. The latter responded to these insinuations in an internal report to the staff committee of the public prosecutors by saying that she had already made the emails from Scholz's environment available to the Ministry of Justice in North Rhine-Westphalia in the spring of this year and that Limbach had picked them up. Brorhilker continues that Limbach would refuse personally these enamels the data to the Hamburg investigation committee to pass on.

In summary, it can be said that the Green Minister of Justice of North Rhine-Westphalia is personally responsible for the cover-up and sabotage of the investigations into the Cum-Ex case in North Rhine-Westphalia and acts in a particularly cover-up manner when the trail leads to the godfather of Hamburg and current Chancellor Olaf Scholz. He then used this cover-up and the contradictions with the bourgeois politicians in Hamburg as an opportunity to shift the blame for this onto the judiciary and repeatedly interfere directly in the Cum-Ex investigations and the judicial structures. Similar to his actions in Cologne, the minister is now also acting in Münster by attempting to fill one of the highest regional judgeships with his preferred candidate. In a special way, this shows how the criminal actions of gangster boss Scholz extend all the way to North Rhine-Westphalia, where a justice minister, for the personal benefit of a criminal network as part of the state government and thus of the executive branch, is rebuilding entire sections of the judicial state apparatus at his discretion. At the same time, however, it also shows the progress of the general development of the decomposition of imperialism and how it must become more and more reactionary in order to hold on to power and is therefore forced to place more and more power in the bourgeois state in the hands of the executive in order to deal with the problems of its rule.

Cover photo: Partners in Crime: Benjamin Limbach and Olaf Scholz. Image created in-house from https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/landespolitik/cum-ex-staatsanwaltschaft-koeln-100.html and https://www.emma.de/artikel/offener-brief-bundeskanzler-scholz-339463