[DECISION] Staff protection in relation to the audit

I tend to agree that this statement sounds a bit “off”; although I wouldn’t go as far as saying “hiding personal interests” - can you be more specific about what you mean?

Regardless - note that this decision is from nearly a year ago by now, so it’s not much use to critique it - except perhaps in the context of the next BoD elections or external audit.

Additional points I would make are:

  • Look how eager the BoD is for sharing information with external parties, compared to how closed and secretive it is towards TDF trustees - on the inside of the organization. When have the BoD ever encouraged employees to share information and documents with the trustees?

  • Some of us - trustees, BoD members, employees - have, to my mind, have exhibited an alarmist and exacerbatory attitude regarding the audit and its finding - as if shouting “the house is on fire, the house is on fire” - where in some of the cases, the house wasn’t really on fire like that. If emplyoees or BoD members were predisposed to find this to be the case, there is the change this impression made it through to the auditor; and even if that is not the case - the audited BoD should have been IIANM consulted for comments or contextual information regarding material being voluntarily presented to the auditors, or material requested by them and provided to them. The phrasing here suggests that would not be done.

Well, only two for the approval?.

To work on the matter, there is just the Compliance.
Understanding Compliance in Germany: A Comprehensive Guide

I do not understand why the Board was not oriented towards its implementation.

To implement it and maintain it, I think it has a cost that is perfectly affordable for TDF.
About four years ago the budget that I received in the company, about 35 employees, and in the complicated mining sector, shortly before retiring, was around 6-8000 euros for its implementation. And its annual maintenance cost a few thousand euros, all contracted with a specialized external company.

So I think we have the way to do it, which also seems essential for the proper functioning of the foundation.

Miguel Angel.

Remember that Sophie and Mike are themselves employees, and Italo may have been paid for contract work regarding marketing (I don’t actually remember) - so they may have needed to abstain.

Hi Eyal,

Look how this BoD started publishing also private minutes, shares audits and the explanations of the audit with its members. There is even more transparency coming but keep in mind that not every single bit of information can be made public for ongoing matters. Then, obviously, there are disclosures that need to be made to authorities and members of staff must be reassured that by making these disclosures they will not be subjected to retaliatory actions by directors that might see some of the information shared as showing their bad behaviours.

I guess you haven’t noticed yet the number of decisions and private minutes that have been shared in this forum showing that this board actually encourages TDF’s members of staff to help with transparency.

It does take time but as you can see things are happening.

One might see things in a positive way and consider the situation as an opportunity to have a house sized pizza oven as long as it’s accepted that the building has anyway changed its purpose.

For a long time some shouted about the uncontrolled expansion of that pizza oven while others where trying to shut them up saying that the situation was framed wrongly.

This board recognised the issue with the overexpanding pizza oven, received confirmation also from the audits, and is trying to get the house back in shape.

That’s not how an audit works. The organisation must present all the evidence through its supervisory body keeping in mind that withholding or misrepresenting information from the auditor is an actual crime. The auditor doesn’t ask for explanation to the board, it works on the information provided and submits the result.

The board can and did ask for further explanations in relation to the misuse of funds by a couple of former directors, unfortunately enabled by the majority of the previous board, and shared that with the members.

Some did try to warn the members about what was going on in the past but it seems like the members did not listen. I hope that the information that is being shared makes you understand why this board had to act in relation to an irresponsible candidacy and why this board will have to take decisions, that might seem unpopular, to save the house.

Ciao

Paolo

Oh, come on, @PaoloVecchi . The vaunted “private minutes” (which I’ve only started to peruse) have so far been mostly trivialities (like “authorize Florian to change access privileges following BoD elections”), or items where the actual meaningful material remains undisclosed (“authorize sending a letter about XYZ” - and the letter is not released). Also, flooding a web forum with posts is almost the most inaccessible way to release information. No access to the system you board members use yourselves; no query-able database; nor even a decently organized zip/tar archive of dated files. For most trustees, they’ll remain more-or-less in the dark effectively, while you guys can claim “but we released all this stuff”.

Morever, the point is that this post is about encouraging employees to share information themselves, while the posts you refer to are not at all the result of trustees asking employees for information and getting it from them.

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You are absolutely right in stating that flooding the forum with decisions and minutes doesn’t make it easy for the community to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

I have the same issue as I have to validate what I state by checking evidence that is spread in about 40K emails in my Thunderbird (dedicated only to TDF) and many board shared folders.

All of that information needs also to be correlated to make sense. I have a decently good memory so I know where the correlations are as I know it’s a huge task for someone starting from zero.

If you know of a tool we could implement that could help us in correlating all the information and make it easier for new board member to understand what happened and how that relates to the decisions we have to take then please do let us know.

In the meantime you are now experiencing what a new board member has to deal with.

Some published decisions aren’t easy to understand without lots of additional information and without correlating that to other bits of information. Eg: in relation to the decision I believe you are referring to:

That’s a letter we had to send to the supervisory authority to correct false/misleading statements made by former board members in response to a request of clarification sent to them by the supervisory authority. If the previous board published all the decisions then the supervisory authority could have, with a lot of effort, found out that the answers were incorrect but at the time the information was not available.

Another example:

Some might find that decision OK but correlating it to other decisions, legal advice and common sense it would be obvious that the board should have not voted for that motion.

I tried to publish that vote in board discuss to show yet another bad decision by the majority of the board but it was the time where I was being censored.

I refer you the thread I started the 02/06/2023 on tdf-internal for more information. As you can see I once again tried to warn the members that things were quite bad but it seems like not many were listening.

So as you can see or you closely follow the evolution of things or it’s quite difficult to start correlating information even when that information is available.

Feel free to ask questions and I’m sure that directors and members of staff will try to help you in understanding what was going on.

Ciao

Paolo

I have a consultancy agreement with The Document Foundation through the company I own together with my wife: Hideas di Tiziana Vola & C., based in Italy and registered at Pavia Chamber of Commerce as a full service marketing agency. When I was elected I immediately declared that I would abstain when the vote was about the team, either as a body or as single individuals, and I have acted consistently.

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An audit works in a way that an auditor must have full, unlimited access to all employees they chose. Not providing it will make the audit fail. The board has to sign this free access is granted.

An auditor never will make their judgement based on just hearsay. In their assessment, they write based on what they came to their conclusion. If you find a reference of „we only heard it from an employee and draw that conclusion“, please show it to me.

In the past, several staff reports of harrassment and health problems were reported but not followed up. People were not encouraged to speak out, they were actually retaliated for doing so, in a way that, as confirmed by others, was suitable to affect their professional careers.

Someone needs to provide data to the auditors, eg a list of decisions, legal statements, accounting ledgers, bank statements and so on. That is not done by the board. In fact, many daily tasks are handled by the employees, in the way decided and set forth by the board. TDF hires employees because the amount of work a volunteer board can do is limited. In the audit reports, the VAT audits and the social security audits you can read that all the administrative work is in perfect order, even if TDF had to deal with some challenges from the past here as well.

Not providing data or not providing unlimited access to employees is an audit failure straight away. Now someone has to do the challenging work to provide all the data, which also contains problematic items that eg were identified by lawyers and shared with the board. If the employees don’t do it, the audit fails, it they do it, they might get retaliated for doing so. That’s why a protection is needed and was required by several legal counsels.

You see with another published decision here that members of the board who are affiliated with ecosystem companies were the contacts for staff reviews, when part of the work of the staff is on tenders. Even more, these very staff members were asked to pay (!) all tenders (including the one to their bosses companies) in the calendar year.

If you know of any other organizations who have people in a double role and have payment of own contracts as part of staff performance reviews, I would be interested in a pointer. It is unlikely to match compliance, isn’t it?

I would also be interested to hear what benefits an employee has in damaging their own employer, as seems suggested here. Losing their job is likely not a benefit, isn’t it? What is the personal interest in creating a problematic situation that not only the employees need to help solve, but also risk their employer vanishing, so they lose their job?

As you see from all the recent publications, this board is encouraging their employees to share information and documents with trustees. The situation surely was different with previous boards.

The fact that only two approvals were given doesn’t render the decision invalid, but it is not an encouraging situation for the employees who have to deal with the audit.

I am glad many more minutes and decisions were published. We surely can improve the presentation of these. It was a lot of work in times when a lot of other issues keep TDF busy, so there is room for improvement.

As for asking employees - I am here, and as long as I can be sure to not be retaliated again, I am usually willing to answer any question. I might not give details on everything for one reason or the other (missing staff protection, concerns privacy of persons, ongoing legal topic etc.), but from my actions you hopefully see I am all for transparency.

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Hi @floeff ,

the below seems inaccurate at best, and a misrepresentation at worst:

If you are referring to the employee oversight committee - that was created in August 2023, more than a year after all tendering was stopped. Please also explain, where you (or any other staff member) was asked to pay all tenders in that calendar year - preferably by publishing the full decision.

It is beyond that curious to read the moral outrage here, directed at one particular part of the community, while it seems that another area with an appearance of self-dealing was left unaddressed by the current board - despite repeated initiatives from @webmink .

Best, Thorsten

It is unclear to me why you keep sharing inaccurate or misleading statements in a public forum knowing that you have plenty of evidence disproving what you state.

Florian is, as usual, correct and the evidence we all have, which I’ve re-checked, confirms that.

Florian is referring to an appraisal written by the 2020-2022 board’s employees oversight committee which included you, Michael and Lothar in which the beneficiaries of the tenders “suggest” to the member of staff “a firm goal” to spend 100% of the money earmarked for tenders which, if I’m not mistaken, between backlog and new budget totalled to about €800.000.

In the same appraisal you also expressed serious doubts about the member of staff impartiality in relation to the provision of legal advice while having full knowledge that the accusation were false.

I’m very confident that Lothar objected also to that, as he had to stop a consultation about the CoI Policy that was going around in circles, but he has clearly been outvoted in the committee by you and Michael which then kept repeating the false narrative that you got no “timely provision of legal advice”.

Naturally you can confirm all of that by reading the threads that start with your email to the employees oversight group dated 16/03/2022. That was one of the first examples of something that had, to use your own words, “an appearance of self-dealing” combined with retaliations against members of staff and then directors that did not comply with your demands that were at best unethical.

That statement is quite misleading.

The process that led to creation of that committee started the 24/03/2023, then sent out again as the first one was completely wrong, when out of the blue Cor sent out the vote to get rid of the areas of oversight:

That vote was allegedly sent out to avoid complying with the request from our supervisory body to remove from the areas of oversight the board members that left the board and those with conflict of interests in specific areas.

That would have meant removing you from the employees, assets and legal areas of oversight but instead the choice went to allowing you access to all the areas while in CoI by simply getting rid of the areas of oversight.

Then as soon as the vote went through you decided to send out a vote to appoint one of your members of staff, in CoI as well, to keep dealing with an unethical appraisal accusing falsely a member of staff.

You did that regardless of the warnings and legal advice against the removal of the areas of oversight and, while in CoI with the matter, the appointing of your member of staff to perform a specific task while in CoI.

It’s only at the end of July that, while acting in CoI, you sent out a vote to appoint Laszlo instead of Gabor in an employee oversight committee to still continue with the same behaviour.

That’s a summary providing enough information showing that Florian is correct and your statements, once again, have not been even minimally validated. Please do stop posting false or misleading statements to avoid wasting people time and keep damaging whatever is left of your reputation.

You will notice that neither Simon nor Laszlo ever tried to clarify the proposal nor their statements. As of today the draft that Simon presented about a year ago remains unfinished so it seems like he does not see the need to finish that proposal an present it to the board.

Ciao

Paolo

When the business entity was to be created, I was offered to also work for it next to my role as Executive Director of TDF. In speaking I was told I could „make some extra money“. I refused this offer as I had concerns about the business entity, and found a double role incompatible with my duties at the nonprofit TDF.

It is known how the business entity story later on developed, with a „meeting to discredit members of staff“, as it was reported. One attendee described it as suitable to negatively affect the professional career of team members. Another attendee described it as they had the impression the team should be fired.

The timely use of funds has repeatedly been used to create pressure regarding tenders. One particularly intimidating episode was when I was shouted at in a board meeting with the request to fix the tender and trademark problems within a very short amount of time, „by the end of the week“ is what I seem to remember. That was absurd.

We have at least one reported case where a team member complained about harrassment for expressing their views

In such climate, it is clear protection is needed for anyone who is involved in an audit, to not have to fear retaliation.

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There are a few things that seriously worry me about this interaction. The first is tone of course - I do not believe that these appraisals (produced by a sub-committee of the board, and AFAIR voted on by the whole board) - were particularly unbalanced.

To characterize their contents as containing “blatant lies” seems exceptionally unhelpful. No doubt people can make mistakes in good faith, can be not in full possession of the facts, can inadvertently make inaccurate statements and so on but lying requires proof of intent. I don’t see any such intent demonstrated here.

Secondly - this E-mail continues a pattern from you Paolo - of selectively, publicly disclosing partial, de-contextualized contents of confidential management interactions with our Executive Director. That still seems unacceptable to me. Such discussions should either remain private - or should be made fully public. @floeff since these (by now rather old) reviews are apparently still so emotive and in my view are mis-represented - would you be happy to have them published in their entirety so Trustees can assess their balance and content in context ? ideally of course with your own account / response alongside them.

Thirdly - many of the rest of your accusations seem to me to misleadingly de-contextualize and attribute unlikely and unfair motivations to participants who had much more convincing and relevant goals: for example ensuring TDF executed effectively and spent its budget in a timely way (feedback that might still be usefully applied today).

Fourthly - I notice that once again we got distracted into discussing apparently emotive things that happened 3+ years ago rather than wrestling with the matters of the day. That is likely to be a mistake - digging up lots of old grievances is unlikely to help us make progress.

On the vote / topic itself - it seems reasonable to have some protections for staff during an audit. My long standing preference is to collect this and other staff-policies into a single document. I would also want such a collection of policies to explicitly state the duty of (executive) staff to be impartial around board decision making as I’ve previously outlined - to avoid any perception of bias.

There are some sad things in this mail - but let me address the one I was involved in:

That is an unfair characterization, presumably based on mis-leading accounts, inappropriately shared by a board member (or deputy) who was present. Sharing details of a confidential meeting - primarily focused on handing-over knowledge and experience around managing the Executive Director from previous to new board members is beyond completely inappropriate. Particularly in view of the damage these misleading accounts have apparently done.

I’m sorry - this is a horribly misleading mis-characterization of what was said. Perhaps the most positive assumption I can make is that if new board members arrive as non-native speakers to a condensed brain-dump of executive staff’s strengths and weaknesses - and they’ve never managed anyone - they might come away frightened that a small number of staff needed to improve in some areas - but !? I really don’t see how anyone can could have come away thinking that we should fire the team. The board should of course should plan for all sorts of strange hypotheticals but loosing significant chunks of the team is something I hope never happens. IIRC there was particular stress at the time relating to the staff collectively organizing to overturn a long-running board initiative which my have colored things.

Again - there is much more to say, none of which would be appropriate here.

If people choose to believe that board members seriously wanted to fire a team of talented contributors working at TDF who we had hired and grown over many years with great patience and with whom many of us collaborated daily - then I would really encourage some sort of deeper plausibility / reality check :slight_smile:

Hi Michael,

I understand that the tone used to express some concepts is very important to you but by reading so many misleading and at times completely false statements being repeated by the same person sometimes I forget to be more diplomatic.

This is yet another long thread that could have been avoided and could have gone unnoticed if that person would have avoided to comment with, I presume, the only intent of yet again misleading the community.

So praising a member of staff and on the same appraisal making up false accusation is something you consider balanced?

Is that something you commonly do in your own company?

As this is an HR matter I would rather avoid disclosing details in public.

I’ve changed the sentence to: “In the same appraisal you also expressed serious doubts about the member of staff impartiality in relation to the provision of legal advice while having full knowledge that the accusations were false.”

I hope you’ll find it more palatable while trying to express the same concept.

Maybe at the time you did not intend to falsely accusing a member of staff. It is entirely possible that you completely forgot that the chairperson, at the time, stopped the legal consultations as you were just making them going around in circles and instead by mistake you thought that the member of staff decided to do that. We could consider that plausible.

In my opinion the intent was anyway demonstrated when the following chairperson, fully aware that the member of staff had no fault in the matter and having been provided written evidence disproving that specific accusation, decided to keep that accusation in the appraisal regardless.

I rather not publicly disclose how it happened that the majority of the board voted to present to the member of staff an appraisal containing false accusation.

Why are you now stating that it was our ED that was being falsely accused?

It was a member of staff and whoever it was I find it unacceptable that you are now trying to breach their right to privacy and confidentiality by calling out people at random.

If the member of staff wants to explicitly state it was him or her that was falsely accused then you should have the sensitivity of letting him or her choose to do so.

There are elements that can be made public to counter misleading and even completely false statement made by some people but then other elements, that could be even more embarrassing for those same people, would be better not to have them in public.

You wrote that appraisal so you could evaluate if it’s really a good idea to make that and the related information public.

I hope you are joking.

It is clear that did not understand the issue at the time but after years of legal troubles for TDF, two audits and 6 months of negotiation I was not expecting such a comment.

I’m not sure if you have followed much of what happened since you left the board but the matters of the day are actually derived by things that happened 3+ years ago and haven’t been sorted yet, you should be aware of it as the board is still waiting for information from you that would help in finally moving forward and fix some of these issues.

We know that is that was in that same appraisal as you weren’t happy that members of the board of trustees, which coincidentally were also members of staff, politely made the board notice that the plan the board wanted to implement was not clear and potentially damaging for TDF and the community.

The newly seated board indeed recognised the very valid arguments and stopped that plan.

Due to what happened then and especially what happened during the past board term I would have thought that you priority would have switched to establishing a Code of Ethics and clear fiduciary duties for directors.
TDF luckily has team members that managed to keep things running smoothly despite the BoD so let’s think about fixing the BoD so that it leads by example before starting to impose policies on staff with the results we have seen during the past board which affected the last audit and will probably affect the new one.

Ciao

Paolo

Hi Michael,

It has been shared by someone else and it has been confirmed by several directors, including myself, in this forum and in tdf-internal.

I’m not totally sure but I believe this is the first time that “meeting” has been mentioned in public:

(adding the image as the original message was deleted by one of the 2 directors that were censoring this forum at the time)

There is nothing misleading in those statements and they are even too diplomatic to describe what happened.

It wasn’t about managing the ED.

If it was about it then we would have had a meeting on TDF’s server and with an agenda shared only between board members but that didn’t happen.

Others considered the secretive way that meeting has been organised, on someone else server and without even disclosing what would have been about, quite dodgy.

Damages done to whom?

The only damages that I can see, which fortunately didn’t happen, are those that could have derived by getting the new members of the board believing the misleading statements your were coming up with in that meeting.

Nothing was said during that meeting. IIRC everyone was left so speechless that no comments were made. It seems like there was also a kind of silent understanding of not to ever talk about it and do like it never happened as it was difficult to believe it actually happened.

Comments made after that meeting by those that were present correspond to what Florian stated.

“staff collectively organizing to overturn a long-running board initiative” could have been the subject of the invitation for that meeting as it captures the spirit of what we had to listen to.

Thanks for finally sharing what drove you to organise that meeting, the subsequent actions and the continuous antagonism toward those that didn’t let that “long-running board initiative” happen.

You and everyone else should be grateful to the members of staff as they have seen the shortcoming you did not see in that “initiative” and the new board acted to check if their warnings were correct and indeed they had very valid points.

Despite requests that were turned down by the previous board, this board finally revoked that decision:

Not sure if I’ve already asked you but … could you please check your statements before posting them so that people don’t have to correct you all the time to avoid that our community get mislead by incorrect messages?

Ciao

Paolo

I found, and re-read my pre-meeting minutes, which we worked through in that call with Thorsten - who was as always gentler and more balanced. They bear no relation to your account here. In addition there is & was no mention of firing the team or any such inflated nonsense.

Apparently there is a desire to once again dig up and build on some carefully manufactured outrage and privately nurtured historic resentment here. There is no useful purpose in refuting this nonsense line by line again - but you can safely assume that I disagree with practically everything you wrote here.

Perhaps it is politically useful currently for you to use these inaccurate reports that can’t be refuted except with some he-says/she-says type stuff, but I refuse to play. Make everyone extremely emotional on these contested topics is a transparently polarizing thing to do - please stop that.

TDF has real issues it needs to solve now - we should focus on those and coming together to move forward.

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Hi @PaoloVecchi ,

this has massively derailed into a flamefest of airing very old grievances. I’m surprised (and was therefore not expecting), that @floeff 's remark was harking back to an appraisal for the year 2021. That was for a period two board terms ago…

Fair enough. A goal for a charitable organisation, to spend all donation money within 2 years is not optional (c.f. § 55 5. AO). Asking staff to spend budget earmarked for the next year in that year therefore seems prudent, instead of outrageous. Clearly nobody asked to pay specific companies, or into specific contracts, and clearly both review and later sign-off happened by a plurality of board members, including non-affiliated ones. As such, I stand by my characterisation of this being an inaccurate description of the event.

What’s more, is that any and all tendering was stopped in May 2022 anyway, so the entire episode had zero relevance in practice.

I remain baffled though, that you seem to defend a regression to a rather more fishy setup for staff management as perfectly above-board today: I can’t quite imagine, that having staff members present while performance, work portfolio, remuneration & other details of employment, HR and contracts of their colleagues and perhaps even their boss is discussed - is not creating needless challenges & friction in the organisation. It would appear to me, that it would also be in your own interest, to avoid any impression of impropriety here, in particular in the current environment. Instead you blame @webmink for not having pushed more stones up the hill, after you had derailed his earlier attempts.

Best, Thorsten

Hi Michael,

As stated, while you never said during that meeting that you wanted to fire members of staff, you made some participants feel that way and that’s why subsequently some made that comment.

While you might have written well meaning pre-meeting minutes then during the meeting you might got carried away and you delivered a message that left most participants speechless.

As far as I’m concerned your speech has been received as a desperate call not to listen to “staff collectively organizing to overturn a long-running board initiative”.

That message was false in the first place as we have only seen polite and board only communications of concerns which turned out to be totally correct.

The only “useful” purpose of replying to these types of messages is to avoid the perpetuation of false narratives.

You could have chosen to avoid making misleading statements and once again I could have avoided spending time in telling you to check your email archive before making incorrect statements in public.

You could also choose to finally apologise for a meeting that should have never happened where you made statements that have been perceived as inappropriate for their content and the attempt to “politicize” a matter that only required an impartial and objective evaluation of the "long-running board initiative”.

I totally agree on this point so if you could invest a few minutes in collecting the information that the board needs to move forward and send it to us today then this week we could prepare a proposal that would allow to close some of the most urgent issues.

Ciao

Paolo

HI Thorsten,

it would be great if every so often you would check your email archive so that you avoid posting misleading messages that then need to be corrected to avoid presenting to the community a misleading narrative.

The appraisal for the work done by the member of staff in 2021 was very good and I never seen any issues with that.

The issues was with the false accusations and specific firm goals written by those that should have not written those suggestions especially after having received legal statements related to applying the arm’s length principle in 2021.

I was surprised then that you didn’t get my comments about it and I find it unbelievable that you still don’t see the issue with that after years of legal troubles.

So as it’s not optional why did you refuse to remove that “firm goal” despite telling you clearly what was the big issue with that statement?

Maybe you want to check again, in the text of the appraisal, the recommendation about payments and why you have been asked to remove also that part.

What is worrying is that even today you still don’t seem to see the correlation between what you did and, reason why tendering was stopped and the ongoing legal issues that those behaviours caused.

You can’t imagine it because it doesn’t happen. Matters related to individuals are handled by a group that doesn’t include members of staff.

I didn’t blame him of anything.

You pointed to “repeated initiatives”, just one, where clarifications have been asked but not received.

We have been acting as if the motion he proposed a year ago was accepted but as it has never been completed it hasn’t been voted on.

I don’t remember if I’ve already told you but it would be great if you validated your statements with the evidence you have available and maybe also by reading the result of the audits showing that you are probably not in the best position to lecture others about good governance.

Please do also find a few minutes to forward to the board the information you know you should shared since 2022 so that we can finally move forward and fix the issues that the previous board dropped on our laps.

Ciao

Paolo

I was on purpose not mentioning any names, I did not point to individuals. I explained why a protection of staff is needed in particular for the audit. Seeing now direct comments on individuals and making it a personal thing is an unfortunate turn of events.

I am NOT agreeing to publish anything concerning HR matters. The question is ridiculous in general and shows an interesting attitude towards members of staff, but even more, this thread is not about me. This thread is about protection of staff involved in the audit, and you turn it into a discussion about individual’s performances. Even more, you continue to push your idea of a staff policy, which is one of the topics that brought another crisis just in the past months the board and me now have to deal with.

While after all those years I am sort of used to get severely attacked in private, in public and behind my back, I think also of my fellow teammates. Several reported cases of harrassment (I am not saying who claimed was harrassed by whom) were not followed up in the past years, and now my teammates probably must fear they will be exposed in the same way if they speak out.

This e-mail clearly indicates what various members of the team had to endure in the past years.

This has nothing to do with language barriers, even if I repeatedly heard such excuse. There are various reports from various team members raising complaints, including health problems.

I remember other interactions. Stop it. Just stop it, I will not tolerate something like that for my team and me. I did not expect any apologies or even thank you to the staff who pointed out severe issues way before they came to life. Listening to those people would have avoided putting TDF in the situation it is today. I would at least have expected to not get further punched. Obviously I was wrong.

Me and others are still here and work hard to solve the situation and are committed to turn things into a positive outcome again. This is of interest for everyone - for TDF, the involved directors personally, as well as the ecosystem companies affected. The situation is already quite complex. If we attack each other in such a way, it will be more and more complicated, and at some point impossible, to solve the issues.

How could any discussion or negotation work after such attacks? It needs to stop. The more heated the situation becomes, the less likely a good outcome will be, which is to the disadvantage to everyone. Attacking those who are working to solve the situation will not help.

It is clear there are demands with some for tenders, trademarks, a business entity, a staff policy and other things. However, TDF is a nonprofit foundation, driven by its statutes, there for the common good. It is not a single decider’s company. Me and others will defend the independence, stability and nonprofit status of TDF, to ensure it will be here also in ten years to come.

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