Chatzimarkakis loses PhD for plagiarism
Jorgo Chatzimarkakis, a German MEP of Greek descent, has had his doctorate title removed after being found guilty of plagiarism.
In a statement on Wednesday, the University of Bonn’s philosophy department said it had decided to revoke Chatzimarkakis’s doctorate on global governance after establishing that several excerpts of his 2000 thesis had been lifted from other people’s work.
The institution said the 45-year-old politician, who is a member of the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), had violated university rules on footnotes and sourcing. It added that more than half of the work was copied.
In a statement posted on his website, Chatzimarkakis said the decision was hard to swallow.
?No one regrets this more than I do,? he said.
The development is seen as a serious blow to Chatzimarkakis’s ambitions to become the next head of the European Parliament’s Committee on Budgetary Control.
This is the third plagiarism case involving German politicians in recent months.
In March, Germany’s Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg gave up his post after being accused of extensive plagiarism in his doctoral thesis.
Two months later, Silvana Koch-Mehrin, 40, resigned as a vice president of the European Parliament, following allegations that she had plagiarized other people?s work in her university thesis. She also resigned from the FDP board.
