Wolfgang Schmitt-Wellbrock (left) pictured in 2010 with an official of the Ministry for Traffic (centre) and the head of the German Patent & Trademark Office, Cornelia Rudloff-Schäffer (right).
Christoph Ernst's disappointing track record in the area of EPO governance makes it tempting to speculate about how things might have turned out if someone with more integrity and backbone had headed the German delegation on the Administrative Council during the Battistelli era.
The deputy representative and ad interim head of the German delegation in December 2010 was Dr Wolfgang Schmitt-Wellbrock.
"The alternate or deputy head of delegation was another official of the Justice Ministry, Dr Wolfgang Schmitt-Wellbrock, who acted as the ad interim head of delegation until Ernst's appointment in April 2011."All other things being equal, Schmitt-Wellbrock might have been expected to move in to fill the gap left by Lutz in December 2010 and take over as head of the German delegation.
There is no information available to explain why this didn't happen. So we are left to speculate as to why Ernst ended up as Lutz's successor instead of Schmitt-Wellbrock.
It's not clear what became of Schmitt-Wellbrock subsequently but as far as is known he is now in retirement.
What is interesting to note is that Schmitt-Wellbrock's name turns up in German media reports from 2016. He was appointed by the Federal Justice Ministry to head an investigation into a covert surveillance scandal in the state of Thuringia (formerly part of the Soviet-controlled East German Democratic Republic).
The investigation was launched after it was revealed that Thuringian police had automatically intercepted and recorded tens of thousands of telephone communications since the late 1990s without the knowledge or consent of those being recorded.
Schmitt-Wellbrock presenting his report on a covert surveillance scandal involving police in the state of Thuringia in December 2016.
"As we will show in the coming parts, Ernst colluded in this regard with his mentor, EPO Vice-President Raimund Lutz, the apparent purpose of their collusion being to derail efforts to push for a reform of the EPO's data protection framework."By an ironic twist of fate, a little over a year earlier in the autumn of 2015, Schmitt-Wellbrock's colleague from the German Justice Ministry, Christoph Ernst, had been busy trying to organise the cover-up of a covert surveillance scandal in the European Patent Office in an attempt to neutralise the impending "threat" of a parliamentary inquiry by the Legal Affairs Committee of the Bundestag.
As we will show in the coming parts, Ernst colluded in this regard with his mentor, EPO Vice-President Raimund Lutz, the apparent purpose of their collusion being to derail efforts to push for a reform of the EPO's data protection framework. ⬆