The General Assembly of the Community of European Railway and Infrastructure Companies (CER) unanimously decided to renew the mandate of CER Executive Director Johannes Ludewig until the end of 2011. Meeting in Gdansk, Poland, the chief executives of private and state-owned European railway and infrastructure companies also welcomed the Latvian freight company Baltijas Tranzīta Serviss as the 75th member of CER.

Johannes Ludewig will remain Executive Director of CER until 31 December 2011.

He was first appointed to this position in 2002 and unanimously re-elected for a first time in 2006. A former CEO of Deutsche Bahn AG (1997 – 1999), Johannes Ludewig has extensive experience in public administration and politics. He spent more than 20 years in the German Ministry for Economics and in the office of
the German chancellor. Since 2006, he has assumed an honorary function as head of the German commission set up to monitor the national government’s efforts to reduce bureaucracy (the “Normenkontrollrat”) and in 2007 he became a founding member of the European Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Administrative Burdens (the “Stoiber Group”).