Damen Claims EUR 4.7bn From Germany Over the F126 Termination — Contractual Payment and Indemnity Claims, Not Damages
Berlin, 1 October 2026
Key points
- Damen Schelde Naval Shipbuilding, prime contractor on the six-ship F126 frigate programme until the defence ministry ended it on 24 June, claims EUR 4,679,663,394 net from the Federal Republic, its lawyer Peter Gauweiler wrote to members of the Bundestag's budget and defence committees and to Boris Pistorius, the defence minister
- Gauweiler: "These are not extra-contractual damages claims, but initially exclusively claims agreed by contract between the Federal Republic and DAMEN"; further damages claims "are currently being examined" (translated). Most of the sum, he writes, passes to the yard's "many hundreds of subcontractors"
- The case rests on June 2024, when the ministry exercised the option for ships five and six and raised the contract value from EUR 4.5 billion to EUR 6.5 billion, while, Gauweiler writes, it already knew the schedule could not be held; a letter of 22 September to the minister's office alleges a breach of official duty by the ministry's political leadership
- Pistorius in July: a "prophylactic counter-attack"; the basis of the termination is "the contractor's poor performance", and Damen knows Germany could have damages claims of EUR 2.3 billion (translated). No court filing is known
The F126 dispute now has two numbers: EUR 4.68 billion that Damen says the contract obliges Germany to pay, and EUR 2.3 billion that Germany says it may claim back.
Gauweiler, a former CSU member of the Bundestag, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that both the declared withdrawal and the termination lacked "any legal basis" (translated). The claim is framed as payment and indemnity, Zahlungs- und Freistellungsansprüche, owed under the contract, which is a different category from damages: it asserts that the contract's own terms oblige the Bund to pay, not that a loss must be proved. The ministry ended the programme on time and cost, putting six ships at more than EUR 18 billion against about EUR 10 billion at the outset, with no ship in the fleet before 2032.
The replacement proceeds regardless. The budget and defence committees are due on Wednesday 7 October to take the financing submission for a second lot of four MEKO A-200 DEU frigates from TKMS, Handelsblatt reports, the option Berlin holds until the end of 2026. When the committee approved the first four in July, reconsidering former F126 subcontractors was one of its conditions.
EUR 4.68 billion is about 72 per cent of the contract's EUR 6.5 billion value, a figure that fits the kind of termination Germany says it did not make. German works-contract law separates two cases. A buyer who terminates for cause owes payment only for the work performed up to that point and keeps its own damages claims (§ 648a BGB); a buyer who terminates at will owes the agreed price, less what the contractor saved (§ 648). "Poor performance" is the language of the first; a contractual claim near three-quarters of the price is the arithmetic of the second. Whether the F126 contract follows the statutory default is not public. When Germany cancelled the programme, one reason it gave for not handing it to Rheinmetall's NVL was that a change of contractor would mean waiving the state's claims against Damen; those claims are now its side of the ledger. Signal No. 159 led with Damen's letter.
Related · F126 and its replacement
- Germany Cancels F126 Frigate Programme, Orders Up to Eight TKMS MEKO A-200 DEU
- Germany's F128 Frigate Submission — Four MEKO A-200 DEU for EUR 6.63 Billion — Pulled From the Budget Committee
- Rheinmetall Naval Systems Tables ~€12BN F126 Takeover Offer; TKMS MEKO A-200 Eight-Ship Option Held as Leverage
