Wegner had already admitted that he had played tennis for an hour at lunchtime and said he wanted to clear his head. Now the “Tagesspiegel” reports that Wegner misrepresented the extent of his phone calls on the morning of January 3rd. The Senate Chancellery rejects this. As the newspaper reports, information from the Senate Chancellery suggests that there were no phone calls from Wegner to the Chancellery or the Federal Ministry of the Interior before the tennis.

In an interview with “Welt TV” on January 7th, Wegner said: “I actually started making the phone calls at 8:08 a.m.” Among other things, he called the crisis teams. “Above all, I spoke to the federal government, to the Federal Chancellery, to the Federal Minister of the Interior.”

Senate Chancellery refers to Wegner’s interview

Was that a misrepresentation? The Senate Chancellery points out that Wegner did not provide any information about the exact timing in the interview: “Everything has been said about this. He did not explain to Welt TV the question of when the Governing Mayor spoke on the phone with the bodies mentioned,” said Senate spokeswoman Christine Richter upon request. “His statement there about the tennis game between 1 and 2 p.m. was only to be understood as a supplement.”

According to the “Tagesspiegel”, the Senate Chancellery released the information about the phone calls after an urgent application from the newspaper to the Berlin Administrative Court. Wegner said on January 4th that he had been “on the phone all day.” He only later admitted the tennis match from 1 p.m. after a corresponding publication by the public broadcaster RBB.

The Berlin Green Party leader Werner Graf accused Wegner of deceiving the public. The SPD’s top candidate for the House of Representatives election, Steffen Krach, said that Wegner had to get the whole truth “over the net”. “But at the moment it doesn’t look like he will succeed.”

At the beginning of January, a suspected left-wing extremist arson attack resulted in a power outage lasting several days in southwest Berlin, which temporarily affected around 100,000 people.