Leuna affair

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Leuna affair is the name for bribe payments in the course of the privatization of the Leunawerke and Minol Mineralölhandel AG, which emerged from VEB Minol in 1990/91.

The French managers Alfred Sirven and Loïk Le Floch-Prigent , as well as the German lobbyist Dieter Holzer , were convicted in France.

background

After reunification , the GDR operations were privatized by the Treuhandanstalt , including the Leuna refinery in Schwedt in Brandenburg and the mineral oil company Minol, which was already very profitably linked to the refinery at the time of the negotiations . The political wish of French President François Mitterrand and Chancellor Helmut Kohl , expressed several times in public , existed that these two companies should be sold to the French group Elf Aquitaine . This should be a symbol of the French involvement in East Germany and increase the number of competitors in the German oil market. The sale took place in 1990/91.

The commercial interest of Elf Aquitaine itself was initially rather low. The plant acquired in Leuna (Saxony-Anhalt) had to be built from scratch, costing billions of dollars. There were also extensive contaminated sites. There was no interest in additional refinery capacities. So the sale could only take place at the price of a high subsidy commitment. The case was different with Minol. The company was the market leader in the new federal states and was very profitable.

Other interested parties in Leuna and Minol were the BP Group, the Tamoil Group and the Kuwaiti company Q8 .

In 1992 and 1993, bribery payments totaling 47 million euros were made from Elf's illicit funds.

Law enforcement in France (and Germany)

The public prosecutor's investigations were initiated by a report by the French examining magistrate Eva Joly , who uncovered the Elf-Aquitaine lubricant affair from Paris . In a collaboration between Joly and the Geneva investigator Paul Perraudin, documents were also forwarded to the German authorities.

The former Elf manager Alfred Sirven is considered to be the mastermind behind the dubious transfer . Managers responsible for this were convicted in France, the former CEO of Elf Aquitaine , Loïk Le Floch-Prigent , was sentenced to three years imprisonment; Sirven for five years. The defendants stated that the funds were used as part of the Leuna privatization.

In 2003, the lobbyist Dieter Holzer was sentenced in Paris to 15 months imprisonment and a fine of 1.5 million euros.

According to investigations by Geneva public prosecutors and examining magistrate Eva Joly, the following happened in the Leuna-Minol privatization scandal: the lobbyists Dieter Holzer and the State Secretary Ludwig-Holger Pfahls (CSU) staged veritable cascades of transactions. According to the Geneva Public Prosecutor's Office, between 1987 and 1997 they moved 130 million euros between Liechtenstein trusts, Swiss and Luxembourg banks, and offshore companies in Antigua and Panama. The Geneva investigating judge Paul Perraudin sees it as a "nonsensical economic structure that justifies a concrete suspicion of money laundering". Countless foreign exchange and cash transactions between the same banks via the accounts of another beneficial owner are classic money laundering transactions . The confusion of these kick-back transfers is to obscure the flow of money and the recipient's identity.

Leuna files allegedly missing in 1998 were available as copies in several ministries.

Trivia

The television journalist Ulrich Wickert used the Leuna affair in 2008 as a template for his detective novel “The useful friend”.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans Leyendecker: Leuna affair - rumors instead of evidence (sueddeutsche.de).
  2. ↑ Torsten Hampel: Grass over it. In: Der Tagesspiegel . November 1, 2001.
  3. ↑ See also the graphic “Wallpaper” on www.recherchieren.org (zip file).
  4. ↑ "Federal extinguishing days" are a legend . Berliner Morgenpost. October 4, 2003. Retrieved January 25, 2013.
  5. ↑ Bild Online: "Ulrich Wickert: How much truth is there in his Leuna crime thriller?" (From August 14, 2008).