Folkard noble

Folkard Edler (born January 31, 1936 ) is a German shipowner , entrepreneur and millionaire in Hamburg . He is the largest private financier of the New Right in Germany.

Life

Folkard Edler comes from a long-established family of shipowners. He is a business graduate. He and his wife lead “a secluded life on the elegant Elbchaussee”, wrote the time in 2019.

Folkard Edler maintains a global network of companies and holdings. He ran several shipping companies, including on Cyprus. His ICL Holding specialized in the transport of beer of the Dutch brand Heineken from the port of Antwerp to Jacksonville , Florida . Edler worked with other important shipowners, including Horst Rahe , the owner of the Deutsche Seereederei , the Döhle family , owner of more than 400 ships and Nicolaus W. Schües , owner of the Laeisz shipping company . In the 1990s Edler was also managing director of over 10 companies.

The ICL Holding decreed in 2015 shareholders' equity of 10.5 million euros. According to Zeit, the balance sheet total of Edler's various companies amounts to at least a double-digit million amount (as of 2019). The only other members of the core team of his entrepreneurial activities are his wife Erika Edler and Iris Sönnichsen.

Support for the New Right

As a financier, Folkard Edler is one of the biggest supporters of the New Right in Germany. It finances projects whose political orientation ranges from conservative circles of the CDU to the national wing around AfD politician Björn Höcke . As the time researched, Edler supported right-wing circles even before the New Right gained strength in Germany and Europe and the term was introduced as such: since the 2000s, he has invested around five million euros in right-wing projects.

In 2001, Edler's name was mentioned publicly for the first time in the party donation report of the German Bundestag for 2001. He is run as a major donor to the German Party (DP) with 25,000 marks. The German party was a right-wing splinter group at the time and stood in various state elections, but barely reached one percent. The party represented xenophobic positions, was in favor of a “Europe of fatherlands” and, according to the times, resembled today's AfD. By 2004 Edler transferred a good 100,000 euros to the "German Party".

The Bundestag's donation report for the 2013 election year shows Folkard Edler and his wife, each with 50,000 euros, as the largest donors for the AfD that year. If the donation had been one euro more, it would have had to be reported to the Bundestag administration immediately, not in the donation report that appeared two years later. In a conversation with the then AfD chairman Bernd Lucke and the Hamburg AfD chairman Jörn Kruse at the end of June 2013, Edler agreed to support the AfD election campaign with two loans of 500,000 euros each. The loans have a low interest rate and Edler only asked for a small amount of security for the first and no security at all for the second. Lawyers criticized that the loan of over one million euros could be a covert party donation.

In 2013 it was not known that the contract was set up for five years and, in addition to the start-up financing for the AfD at that time under Lucke, the party also today under their u. a. national-conservative orientation among personalities like Alexander Gauland still benefited from it.

In the spring of 2013 Edler bought a house in Berlin's Fasanenstrasse 4 near the Berlin Zoo using the “Objekt Fasanenstrasse GmbH” he founded for this purpose for 3.6 million euros. The new right think tank library of conservatism was set up there. Edler had his shares in the Objekt Fasanenstraße GmbH transferred to the “Support Foundation for Conservative Education and Research”. She now owns the property.

He promotes the preservation of historical monuments and, in particular, by setting up a foundation, he has promoted the total renovation of the building for animal anatomy (anatomical theater) in Berlin built by Carl Gotthard Langhans.

Political classification

Even if Folkard Edler does not appear in public, elements of his political stance are known. He represents positions that are critical of the euro and climate-skeptical. In 2003 he wrote a letter to the editor for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in which he turned against the trade unions . They would have advocated the euro and are now resisting the labor market reforms that have become necessary. In 2007 he accused the Handelsblatt of "defaming" all those who doubt man-made global warming . In 2006, he campaigned for Junge Freiheit in a letter to the editor after the new right sheet had been unloaded from the Leipzig Book Fair.

On the night of August 11, 2016, an Antifa group set fire to a Porsche Carrera in front of Edler's headquarters on Elbchaussee . In a letter she admitted that Folkmar Edler had been considered a supporter of the “völkisch racist AfD party”.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ kompany.de: ICL Atlantica GmbH
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n} Boris Kartheuser, Paul Middelhoff: AfD: In bed with the alternative . In: The time . May 24, 2017, ISSN  0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed May 1, 2019]).
3. ↑ Sönnichsen, Iris, Hamburg. Accessed May 1, 2019 . 
4. ^ Edler, Erika, Hamburg. Accessed May 1, 2019 . 
5. ↑ A tricky deal: AfD got a cheap million dollar loan from Hamburg shipowners . In: Spiegel Online . December 15, 2013 ( spiegel.de [accessed on May 1, 2019]).
6. ↑ Gernot Knödler: Doubtful credit business: Shipowner helps AFD on the jumps . In: The daily newspaper : taz . December 16, 2013, ISSN  0931-9085 ( taz.de [accessed on May 1, 2019]).
7. ↑ Marcel Pauly: The sponsors of the parties . In: The world . July 23, 2015 ( welt.de [accessed May 1, 2019]).
8. ↑ Monuments, Magazine of Monument Culture in Germany No. 2, February 2004
9. ↑ chronicle: color against Reeder Folkard Edler and Porsche fire. Accessed May 1, 2019 .