The Bundeseisenbahnvermögen (BEV) is a special authority of the Federal Republic of Germany. It was called into existence by the Eisenbahnneuordnungsgesetz (ENeuOG; Railway Re-organisation Act) dated December 27, 1993.
Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central and Western Europe, lying between the Baltic and North Seas to the north, and the Alps to the south. It borders Denmark to the north, Poland and the Czech Republic to the east, Austria and Switzerland to the south, France to the southwest, and Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands to the west.
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With its current budget of €7.7 billion, it is administered by the Federal Transport Ministry and the Federal Finance Ministry. The BEV is the superior authority of all civil servants formerly belonging to the Deutsche Bundesbahn and the Deutsche Reichsbahn . It also is responsible for the pension handling of about 400,000 former railway employees and manages the railway servant health insurance fund. Its head offices are located in Bonn, while several regional offices can be found all over Germany, divided by the region they serve: East (Berlin), Central (Frankfurt am Main with branch in Saarbrücken), North (Hanover with branch in Hamburg), South West (Karlsruhe with branch in Stuttgart), West (Köln with branch in Essen) and Southern Germany (Munich with branch in Nuremberg). 138 people are employed at the BEV's head office, 791 at the various branches. Including civil-servants delegated to the Deutsche Bahn AG to serve in their former positions, the BEV has (2007) a staff of about 4,700. [1]
The civil service is independent of government and is also composed mainly of career bureaucrats hired on professional merit rather than appointed or elected, whose institutional tenure typically survives transitions of political leadership. A civil servant or public servant is a person employed in the public sector on behalf of a government department or agency. A civil servant or public servant's first priority is to represent the interests of citizens. The extent of civil servants of a state as part of the "civil service" varies from country to country. In the United Kingdom, for instance, only Crown employees are referred to as civil servants whereas county or city employees are not.
The Deutsche Bundesbahn or DB was formed as the state railway of the newly established Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) on 7 September 1949 as a successor of the Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft (DRG). The DB remained the state railway of West Germany until after German reunification, when it was merged with the former East German Deutsche Reichsbahn (DR) to form Deutsche Bahn AG, which came into existence on 1 January 1994.
A pension is a fund into which a sum of money is added during an employee's employment years, and from which payments are drawn to support the person's retirement from work in the form of periodic payments. A pension may be a "defined benefit plan" where a fixed sum is paid regularly to a person, or a "defined contribution plan" under which a fixed sum is invested and then becomes available at retirement age. Pensions should not be confused with severance pay; the former is usually paid in regular installments for life after retirement, while the latter is typically paid as a fixed amount after involuntary termination of employment prior to retirement.
Until his death on December 5, 2006 the president of the BEV was Rolf Heine. Since August 1, 2009, Marie-Theres Nonn is president of the BEV.
