Austrian racist Haider’s financial scandal

From the (conservative) Daily Mail in England:

Riddle of Haider‘s secret £40m: Cash found in European principality of Liechtenstein

By Allan Hall In Berlin

Last updated at 8:02 AM on 2nd August 2010

More than £40million in undeclared cash belonging to Austria’s late far-Right leader Joerg Haider has been found in the secretive European principality of Liechtenstein.

The money, in euros, was discovered in accounts uncovered by investigators from Austria, Switzerland and Germany.

They identified a dozen companies registered in Liechtenstein and linked to the former leader of his country’s Freedom Party.

Profil Magazine, citing judicial sources, said the origins and the nature of the investments was unknown.

The accounts were discovered during investigations into the takeover of Austrian bank HGAA by Germany’s BayernLB in 2007, and the privatisation of Austrian property company Buwog in 2004.

Haider was a wealthy man at the time of his death in 2008. As well as being governor of Carinthia he owned a fabulous estate incorporating sawmills and lakes.

Haider inherited lots of wealth from his nazi father, who got it by stealing Jewish property during Hitler’s Third Reich.

The Haider Diaries: A Right-Wing Populist, Two Dictators and Millions of Euros: here.

The extreme right FPÖ primarily owes its political recovery to the rightwing policies of the social democrats who have been governing Austria in a grand coalition with the conservatives for three-and-a-half years: here.

Caught in a whirlpool of corruption, businessmen and politicians involved in the BayernLB scandal are conspiring to make the working class pay for the state-owned bank’s losses: here.

In January, Gerhard Gribkowsky, the former risk manager of the Bavarian regional public-sector bank BayernLB, was taken into custody under suspicion of bribery, tax fraud and breach of trust toward his former employer — in what the German paper Sueddeutsche Zeitung is saying “could become Germany’s biggest case of corruption”: here.

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• Austria’s far-Right loses stronghold of Joerg Haider (telegraph.co.uk)
• Far-right lose out in elections (morningstaronline.co.uk)
• Ex-Hypo Alpe CEO Sentenced to 30 Months in Jail Over Fund Misuse – Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
• Euroskeptic tycoon passes first Austrian vote tests (news.yahoo.com)
• Austrian Lobbyist Hochegger Charged with Money Laundering (novinite.com)