Soverdia

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The Soverdia ( Societas Verbi Divini ) Gesellschaft für Gemeinwohl mbH is a commercial enterprise of the order of the Steyler Missionaries based in Nettetal , North Rhine-Westphalia. The company was involved in the Flick affair in the late 1970s .

Flick affair

The Soverdia worked in illegal transactions at the expense of the taxpayer that the CDU - German MP Walter Loehr had the Divine Word Father Joseph Schröder, then managing director of Soverdia suggested. The Flick Group donated a total of DM 12.3 million for the order to society over several years . They issued a tax-deductible donation receipt for the amount in question and transferred 80 percent back to Flick via Swiss accounts, Soverdia kept 10 percent for the tasks of the Steyler Order and 10 percent was given to Löhr as a "commission" in cash for - as it was called - political tasks of the CDU. (In a few years there were deviations from this.) The Flick Group made a net profit because Soverdia directly remitted 9.3 million DM of the donated 12.3 million DM, and about 5 million DM as a tax refund got at the taxpayer's expense. The money transferred back to Flick went to a "black box" and did not appear in the official bookkeeping.

In addition, Soverdia GmbH issued donation receipts to medium-sized donors such as doctors or merchants in five times the amount donated, e.g. B. she certified a donation of DM 10,000 for the DM 2,000 actually donated. During the investigation into these cases, Klaus Förster from the Sankt Augustin tax investigator came across files of the Flick Group during a house search of the Steyler missionaries and subsequently uncovered its illegal donation system. The investigation of the transactions between Soverdia and the Flick group led to a house search of the Flick headquarters in Düsseldorf, during which further illegal transactions of a far greater extent were discovered, which then triggered the Flick party donation scandal.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Johannes Volmert: Flick. The bought republic . In: Armin Burkhardt, Kornelia Pape (Hrsg.): Politics, language and credibility . Westdeutscher Verlag, Wiesbaden 2003, ISBN 3-53114-165-1 . P. 23 and 28.
  2. ↑ Hubert Seipel: A man and power . In: Tagesspiegel , October 8, 2006.