My contribution to a board
The questions I can help a supervisory board ask are about evidence: where a figure came from, what it leaves out and who it affects. In an asset-heavy company with many household customers, the most consequential numbers are often produced far from the boardroom, by a meter reader, a caretaker, a valuer or a billing system, and a board sees them only after several translations. I have spent twenty-seven years at each of those points: designing rent surveys, producing heating statements, testing valuations for a lender and now running the data of a landlord with 196,400 flats.
I would bring three things in particular. First, a working knowledge of how asset-condition data is gathered and where it is thin, which matters to any company with old pipes, roofs or networks and a renewal programme to sequence. Second, experience of data that reaches customers directly, such as bills, rent letters and consumption figures, and of the disputes that follow when that data is wrong. Third, practical familiarity with the GDPR and with EU sustainability reporting from the side of the people who have to produce the figures.
There are also gaps a nominating committee should hear from me. I am not an accountant or an auditor. German law expects a listed company's supervisory board and audit committee to include members with expertise in accounting and in auditing, and I would not claim to be either. On an audit committee I would contribute on the controls behind reported data, alongside members with that expertise, and I would not seek to chair it. A technology or data committee, where a company has one, is the committee I could lead after a year.
I also know what it is to be on the receiving end of a management paper. On the Lindenkamp cooperative board I have learnt how little a supervisory board sees unless someone decides to show it, and how to ask for the missing evidence without turning every meeting into an inquiry.
Judgement in practice
01Condition evidence for the valuers in a falling market
In 2023 German residential values were falling and our portfolio was heading for a decline of about nine per cent. I proposed giving our external valuers our riser and roof survey evidence for the first time. Finance and investor relations asked me to wait a year. The audit committee chair asked to see the paper, and the committee supported including it. The surveyed buildings lost about €95 million of value, partly offset by €30 million where condition was better than convention assumed. The judgement I would take to another board is that a known defect left out of a valuation input is a control weakness, whatever the market is doing, and that the right moment to disclose bad news is when you hold it.
02A processor's breach and a seventy-two-hour clock
In 2024 a metering service provider that processes data for us found that an attacker had accessed a server holding names, addresses and bank details of about 3,200 of our tenants. Its first draft proposed telling us after its own investigation finished. The GDPR expects a controller to notify the supervisory authority within seventy-two hours of becoming aware of a breach where feasible, and to tell affected people where the risk to them is high. I asked our data-protection officer to treat the provider's call as the start of that clock, and we notified the authority within two days and wrote to every affected tenant within a week, with advice on watching for fraudulent debits. On a board I would ask how a company learns about incidents at its processors, not only at itself.
03A uniform rent increase questioned at the cooperative
In 2022 the executive board of the Lindenkamp cooperative proposed a uniform four per cent rent increase for all members to fund modernisation. As a supervisory board member I asked to see increases set against the condition and modernisation history of each estate, because members in unmodernised 1960s blocks would be paying for work done elsewhere. The analysis showed the gap was real. The executive board revised the proposal to differ by estate, between two and six per cent, and the members' representatives approved it. A supervisory board should test whether a simple proposal is also a fair one, without designing the alternative itself.
My first year on a board
My first year on a supervisory board would be organised around questions rather than a calendar. Which figures does this board rely on most, and how far are they produced from the boardroom? I would trace three of them, perhaps customer numbers, asset condition and a regulated price, back to their source, with management's agreement, and walk one asset, a pumping station, a heating plant or an estate, with the people who maintain it.
What does the board receive, and what does it never see? I would read two years of supervisory board and committee minutes, the auditor's reports and the most recent investment plan, and ask the chair which questions the board found hardest to answer last year.
Where can I be useful soon, and where should I stay quiet? For the first year I would contribute on data, customer records and renewal programmes, where I have evidence, and listen on finance, law and labour relations, where colleagues know more. Before the year ended I would ask the chair for frank feedback on whether my questions helped.
Conflicts and their management
Haselwerder has the first claim on me. I would decline a seat at any landlord, property developer, valuer, metering service provider or property-technology company, any supplier or customer of Haselwerder, and any company competing with it for housing in its markets. My cooperative seat is in Bremen, where Haselwerder owns few flats, and I absent myself from any Lindenkamp discussion that touches Haselwerder.
Before accepting anything, I would ask Haselwerder's management board for consent and disclose my employee shareholding and my cooperative seat to the nominating company. If a relationship appeared later, for example a supply contract between the two companies, I would raise it immediately, leave the room for the item and resign if it was likely to recur.
Time is the other conflict. Haselwerder's own reporting season and the December valuation cycle are fixed, so I would agree meeting dates a year ahead and hold twenty-four days genuinely free, preparation included.
My independence statement
I am a full-time employee of Haselwerder Wohnen SE and hold a small number of its shares through the employee share plan. I would only consider a seat at a company with which Haselwerder and I have no commercial, family or financial relationship of substance, and I would set out every relevant fact before any nomination. Whether I count as independent under the German Corporate Governance Code or a company's own criteria is for that company's supervisory board to judge, not for me to assert.
Committee contribution
Chair and member readiness| Capacity | Committees |
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| Ready to chair | A technology or data committee of a supervisory board, after a year as a member |
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| Ready to join | Audit committee, contributing on data controls behind reported figures · Sustainability committee · Building or investment committee |
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Board and committee exposure
Presented to the Board or a committee
Haselwerder Wohnen SE
Supervisory board audit committee: controls over valuation inputs and the data in sustainability reporting
October 2021–present
Presents twice a year at the committee's invitation, including the 2023 proposal to give valuers our condition evidence; not a member and holds no vote.
Presented to the Board or a committee
Haselwerder Wohnen SE
Management board: data strategy, budgets and changes to tenant-facing data processes
April 2021–present
Presented the comparison-flat rule, the carbon-cost classification and the retention schedule for decision; not a member of the management board.
Reported to a committee
Haselwerder Wohnen SE
Supervisory board sustainability committee: heating, energy and carbon-cost data
March 2024–present
Reports once a year on the quality of energy and carbon-cost data and on progress with remote reading.
Served as a director
Baugenossenschaft Lindenkamp eG
Supervisory board of a 4,800-flat housing cooperative, including its building committee
June 2019–present
Elected by the members' representatives; reviews the executive board's annual accounts, rent policy and modernisation plans; unpaid apart from an attendance allowance.
Capacity and preferences
- Time available
- 24 days per year
- Current directorships
- 1
- Sectors
- Municipal water and district-heating utilities · Housing cooperatives and municipal housing companies · Infrastructure operators with large customer bases · Property valuation and data businesses with no relationship to Haselwerder
- Company type
- A German company with long-lived physical assets and many household customers, such as a municipally owned utility or a mid-sized listed or family-owned operator, with no business relationship with Haselwerder
- Company stage
- An established company facing a large renewal or decarbonisation programme, where the quality of asset and customer data will shape decisions for a decade
The seat I am pursuing
I am looking for one supervisory board seat, in addition to my cooperative seat, at a German company whose physical assets will need renewing over the next decade and whose customers are households: a municipally owned water, district-heating or multi-utility company, or a mid-sized listed or family-owned operator of networks or housing. I understand that in municipal companies many seats are held by elected council members; I would serve as one of the external members a shareholder chooses to appoint for specific expertise.
I would expect to join the audit or sustainability committee and, where one exists, a technology or data committee, which I could chair after a year. I am not looking for a portfolio of seats while I remain an executive, and I would not take a seat where my contribution would be ornamental. The seat I want is one where a renewal programme or a change in customer billing depends on data the board cannot yet see clearly.
Governance learning and readiness
IICA Independent Directors’ Databank: Not yet registered
India's IICA Independent Directors' Databank serves appointments to Indian companies and plays no part in choosing members of a German supervisory board, so I have not registered. In Germany the relevant expectations come from company law, the German Corporate Governance Code for listed companies and, for municipally owned companies, the governance codes many cities adopt for their holdings.
- Seven years on the supervisory board of Baugenossenschaft Lindenkamp eG, including the cooperative's statutory audit cycle
- Twice-yearly presentations to Haselwerder's supervisory board audit committee since 2021
- A part-time certificate in property valuation completed in 2012
- Study of the German Corporate Governance Code and of supervisory board duties with Haselwerder's general counsel in 2025