criticism after having transformed the Twitter account that his staff had built up for his European Parliament presidency into his own personal account in order to use it as part of his candidature to the EU Commission. During his time as President of the European Parliament, Schulz removed a paragraph critical of his stewardship in a key committee report set for debate on 2 April 2014, thereby attracting a lot of negative attention. As a consequence, a large majority of the European Parliament voted on 4 April 2014 to invite Schulz to resign so that he would be able to campaign for the European elections. Lastly, Schulz was criticized about the tax-free daily allowance of €304 the President of the Parliament received, until 18 April 2014, which he received while he was campaigning to become President of the commission. This was paid for 365 days a year, in addition to his salary of 200 thousand euros per year. A member of parliament receives this daily allowance only for attending. Allegation of favoring close employees In April 2017, the European Parliament, as part of its decision to discharge the financial year 2015, criticized two personnel matters where Schulz had been responsible for as President of Parliament. An employee of the parliament received an expatriation allowance of around 20,000 euros, even though his center of life had previously been in Berlin. The employee was a confidant of Schulz and later worked for the SPD as its campaign manager. Schulz was also accused of signing irregular promotions of close associates in a presidential decree that would have secured them financially advantageous posts beyond his departure. Schulz described the complaint as an election maneuver by "anti-Europeans, conservatives and Greens" and referred a decision of the European Anti-Fraud Office not to initiate an official investigation. Foreign Minister debate On the day of the 2017 Federal Election, Schulz said he would under no circumstances become a minister of a government led by Angela Merkel or negotiate to form a Grand Coalition. After the SPD and Union parties finished their coalition talks on 6 February 2018, he made his intentions clear that he wanted to be Foreign Minister in the next government. This was met by heavy criticism from the party base, as Schulz was abandoning his word for a second time—the first being his vow not to enter coalition talks with Angela Merkel. The harshest criticism