Hamburg's finance senator criticised for granting start-up funding

Did Hamburg's financial authorities fund an accelerator because a manager is close to the ruling SPD? At least this is the accusation of the opposition.

The CDU and the Left accuse Hamburg's Finance Senator Andreas Dressel (SPD) of having favoured the Next Media Accelerator (NMA) when awarding funding. According to information from the Süddeutsche Zeitung , the financial authority waived a Europe-wide call for tenders when awarding a contract for start-up funding and gave the Next Media Accelerator funding amounting to nine million euros. The accelerator is intended to bring fintechs to Hamburg.

The opposition parties now want to know how the award went down, and accuse Dressel of awarding the contract according to SPD party allegiances. NMA manager Nico Lumma is a member of the media and net policy commission of the SPD party executive and knows Finance Senator Dressel personally. He is also co-founder of the digital policy association D64, which is also close to the SPD. The red-green senate rejects the accusations.

In a transparency announcement, the Hamburg finance authority cites as the reason for its decision that no other competitor had met the city's mandatory criteria. In addition, the authority had been under time pressure in awarding the contract, because otherwise the subsidies would have lapsed unused.