Another FDP politician faces plagiarism charges

This time, the culprit is Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, who has been in the news recently quite a bit because he is half Greek, half German and has therefore repeatedly been asked to explain what's going on in Greece to German TV audiences. I found him to be quite an affable fellow, especially because he openly says he holds both passports; Germany officially does not allow double citizenship, but in practice foreigners are not allowed to keep their passports when they become German – there are practically no checks of whether someone with a German passport has or gets another.

Anyway, this guy really takes the cake with his dissertation. In the chart you see, the blue stuff at the beginning and end is the intro and bibliography, which are not checked for plagiarism. In the rest, the white stuff is where no plagiarism was found. As of this morning, plagiarism had been found on 72 percent of this guy's dissertation, and all of the red stuff is pages that were more than 75 percent plagiarized. He is expected to lose his doctorate officially in two weeks.

This from the party whose slogan is "Leistung muss sich lohnen" (performance should be rewarded).

On a similar note, his fellow FDP politician Koch-Mehrin, who also lost her doctorate, refuses to step down as a member of European Parliament, though she was forced to step down from the committee on research after a slew of German researchers said they refused to be represented by someone who had so obviously committed plagiarism. Otherwise, Koch-Mehrin is sticking to her position that her university did not catch her plagiarism when she submitted her dissertation and therefore has no right to take away her doctorate.

You have to admire her for her chutzpah.