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Jörg Dornau, a member of Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and an MP at the state parliament (Landtag) in Saxony, reportedly employs political prisoners at an agricultural firm he owns, according to a report by the independent Belarusian outlet Reform.news citing one of the detainees.
Dornau's company allegedly entered into a contract with the Center for the Isolation of Offenders (CIP) — a prison in the western Belarusian town of Lida located near the enterprise. Prisoners were paid 5 euros ($5.60) per day for their labor, with Dornau reportedly inspecting their work in person.
According to political prisoner Andrei (name changed), who was detained at the CIP for 15 days over a “like” on social media, he and other prisoners signed a labor contract and were then taken to a “dark, cold basement.” There they sorted onions from morning until 6 p.m. Andrei noted that the payment of the prisoners’ wages depended on the foreman's approval:
“If the foreman deemed the detainee’s work satisfactory, they were paid. The Lida CIP received 30 Belarusian rubles, while detainees got around 20. The onions were sorted for the 'Euroopt' retail chain.”
LLC “Tsybulka-Bel” (ООО «Цыбулька-Бел») specializes in cultivating onions and other agricultural crops. As noted by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), Dornau has been a co-owner of the company since 2020 and its director since 2023.
Although it is legal for MPs to run businesses in Germany, Saxony’s parliament fined Dornau 20,862 euros in August — three times his monthly salary as an MP — for failing to report his income and for avoiding questions about his Belarusian enterprise.
As with other AfD MPs, Dornau has repeatedly voiced pro-Russian sentiments. The FAZ report details the following incidents:
“Dornau has distinguished himself as a fan of [Belarusian dictator Alexander] Lukashenko and enemy of Ukraine through Facebook posts. [...] Dornau also approvingly posted that Ukraine must be denazified, adopting [Vladimir] Putin's choice of words. He also said that Ukrainian President [Volodymyr] Zelensky he should ‘finally think – and dress in a civilized manner.’”
Earlier this year, an investigation by The Insider and Der Spiegel exposed Vladimir Sergienko as an asset of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). Sergienko, who at the time was an adviser to AfD Bundestag deputy Eugen Schmidt, attempted to scuttle Berlin’s shipment of main battle tanks to Ukraine. Following the publication of the story, Sergienko stepped down from his position and was later stripped of his German citizenship for “fraudulently deceiving” the authorities in Berlin.
The AfD recently finished first in the Thuringia parliamentary elections and secured second place in Saxony, falling short of the top spot by less than 2%. The AfD also recently came second in the eastern state of Brandenburg, securing 29.2% of the vote, just behind Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), which won 30.9% according to preliminary projections.