According to the newspaper, Berlin has spent a great deal of money on refugee facilities. Since 2015, the local real estate company BIM has been renting the former Tetrapak factory on behalf of the local authorities to house over 1,000 asylum seekers.
BIM transfers the private owner of the factory about 1.5 million euro annually, however, not a single refugee has ever moved there.
The rental contract runs until 2018. The renting of the facility will cost Berlin all in all over five million euro.As result, BIM proposed to use the facility as a warehouse for the new Regional Office for Refugee Affairs (Landesamt für Flüchtlingsangelegenheiten (LAF)).
The Tetrapak factory is not the only example of a refugee facility which has remained empty. For example, Berlin invested a lot of money into a refugee center at Tempelhof Airport designed for 2,000 asylum seekers, but only 600 of the places have been used by refugees so far.
The European Union has been struggling to manage a massive refugee crisis which escalated in 2015 with hundreds of thousands of people from the Middle East and North Africa seeking asylum in EU member states. Germany welcomed over one million refugees in 2015 alone.
Earlier in February, the EU border agency Frontex stated that the bloc is still experiencing high migration pressure, with about 382,000 illegal migrants arriving to European countries in 2016. At the same time, the agency also pointed out that some 176,000 non-EU citizens were returned last year to their country of origin.
