BERLIN: Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder drew fire on Saturday from opposition politicians and some commentators for becoming chairman of a gas company he helped launch last year with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The news Schroeder would become chairman of the North European Gas Pipeline (NGEP) less than a month after leaving office was announced on the margins of a ceremony on Friday for the $6 billion project to lay a pipeline between Russia and Germany on the floor of the Baltic Sea.

“It stinks,” Greens co-leader Richard Buetikofer, whose party was in power with Schroeder’s Social Democrats when the pipeline deal was struck, told Tagesspiegel newspaper.

While newspaper commentators generally agreed the pipeline project was useful, they said Schroeder’s move raised fresh questions about the links between big business and politics and Schroeder’s cosy relations with Putin when in office.

There were calls for Germany to draw up a code of conduct governing private sector involvement for former holders of high office.

Schroeder confirmed on Friday he will take up the role but details of his remuneration, if any, are not known. Dirk Niebel of Germany’s opposition Free Democrats urged Schroeder to say whether he was being paid.

“The problem lies not in the size of Schroeder’s salary, even though he could, as a well rewarded Chancellor, have sat back and relaxed,” Berliner Zeitung newspaper wrote in an editorial.

“The problem is that he pursued a policy for the federal republic which he will now draw private benefit from.”

The news cast a new “smudgy light” on the Schroeder government’s cool relations with Poland and the Baltic States and oft-criticised silence on Russian policies in the Caucuses, the newspaper added.

Poland has been very critical of being left out of the pipeline project, which is 51 per cent owned by Russian gas giant Gazprom. German firms E.ON AG and BASF AG each hold 24.5 per cent through their gas units.

However, the German chairman of corruption watchdog Transparency International said he was not concerned.“A supervisory board post is in our view certainly something that a former prominent politician can take up,” Hansjoerg Elshorst told Tagesspiegel.

“One can only talk of abuse if Schroeder receives excessive reward.”—Reuters