peanuts
Peanuts ( English for peanuts ) is an expression for small things or insignificant sums of money in English (and for some years also German). The word was declared the German word of the year in 1994 .
Hilmar Kopper , former CEO of Deutsche Bank AG , used the expression “peanuts” in the course of the insolvency of the real estate entrepreneur Jürgen Schneider for open tradesmen's bills worth 50 million DM (adjusted for inflation today approx. 36.5 million euros) paid by Deutsche Bank wool. Kopper put this number in relation to the total claims amounting to 5 billion DM (adjusted for inflation today approx. 3.6 billion euros). The unpaid tradesman's bills apparently only corresponded to one percent of the total amount lent on existing real estate, but were of existential importance for the numerous, mostly small businesses and led to insolvencies with job losses.
Re-use
The collective bargaining in 1996 for employees in the banking and insurance industry was organized by the trade union Commerce, Banks and Insurance (HBV) , alluding to Kopper's statements, under the motto “Peanuts for everyone, cash on the claw ”.
In 1996, Carlo Rola staged the Jürgen Schneider scandal as a film satire with Ulrich Mühe in the lead role under the title Peanuts - The Bank pays everything .
Hilmar Kopper had himself photographed on a mountain of peanuts for the advertising campaign “ There's always a clever head behind it ” for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung .
prehistory
The expression "peanuts" spread in the English-speaking world after the Lockheed affair in the 1970s. It was an international bribe scandal in which the highest circles of several countries were involved. Peanuts (peanuts) was a code word for certain amounts of money. “'One hundred peanuts' stood for 100 million yen (approx. 850,000 marks). (…) Another Lockheed confidante, Hiroshi Itoh, acknowledged on August 9, 1973: 'I confirm receipt of one hundred peanuts', which, according to auditor Findley, was actually 100 million yen (850,000 marks), ”wrote Der Spiegel at the time .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Focus .de: Jürgen Schneider - The "Peanuts" bankruptcy , accessed on February 28, 2014
- ↑ Jens Koch : The letter of comfort . Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2005, ISBN 978-3-16-148674-6 , p. 538 . , Excerpt from google books with the wording of the declaration
- ↑ On the 65th again in turbulent times on March 9, 2000 in Manager Magazin
- ↑ "Mr. Peanuts “hangs in power from March 10, 2005 on Spiegel Online
- ↑ "FAZ" advertisements: More beautiful hiding for advertising purposes / "FAZ" advertising motifs: The clever and the heads of Martin U. Müller on Spiegel.de, as of November 17, 2011
- ↑ “They are brothers, I can tell you” , Der Spiegel 8/1976, February 16, 1976.