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The scandal surrounding donations from disguised parties has again had dire consequences for the AfD. According to information from SPIEGEL, the party must pay fines totaling 504,429.36 euros for illegally accepting two illegal “straw man donations” from Switzerland. A spokesman for the Bundestag administration confirmed to SPIEGEL that two corresponding sanction notices from the responsible control department had recently been sent to the party.
The background of the first payment of the fine of 108,412 euros is the financing of the congress organized by AfD »European Visions – Visions for Europe« on February 13, 2016. As SPIEGEL revealed in June 2017, part of the event costs were unknown sources. an advertising agency in Switzerland was funded.
The Bundestag administration now assessed this funding as an illegal donation from the party and issued a penalty notice of three times the amount.
Two prominent AfD representatives, the then state president of the North Rhine-Westphalia state association, Marcus Pretzell, and the then conational spokesperson Frauke Petry, appeared at the event.
The second notice of sanction of 396,016.56 euros is the result of a payment for the electoral campaign of Alice Weidel, now president of the AfD parliamentary group, which is also classified as an illegal party donation. The fine corresponds to three times the amount of a donation of 150,000 Swiss francs that went to the association of the AfD district of Weidel on Lake Constance in the 2017 federal election campaign. The money, then equivalent to about 132,000 euros, was transferred in several tranches to the accounts of two Swiss pharmaceutical companies. Among other things, “Alice Weidel Socialmedia Election Campaign Donation” was specified as the intended target.
After a research team from NDR, WDR and “Süddeutsche Zeitung” uncovered the process in November 2018, doubts quickly arose that the drug companies were actually the donors. The suspicion was explosive: the acceptance of “straw man donations”, in which the real donors are hidden, is prohibited by party law. Despite the dubious circumstances where the money from Switzerland ended up in the AfD, it was only returned to the sender months later.
The supposed donors were straw people
Under pressure from the disclosures, the AfD finally had to admit in late 2018 that the 132,000 euros actually came from someone else; the money was allegedly donated by 14 individuals residing in Germany, Spain and Belgium, the AfD informed the Bundestag administration.
In search of the actual sponsor of the € 132,000 donation for Alice Weidel, the trail leads to Duisburg real estate billionaire Henning Conle, who is based in Zurich.
The suspicion is reinforced by bank documents confiscated in Switzerland. According to information from SPIEGEL and “Report Mainz”, the Konstanz prosecutor’s office investigators, who are investigating the case, discovered a strange pattern in the reconstruction of account movements: before the donation money, divided into tranches, was transferred by the Swiss pharmaceutical companies to the Weidel district association AfD. The companies must have received the corresponding payments that could be assigned to Conle.
The billionaire businessman is considered a kind of ghost and avoids public appearances. In the past, he was repeatedly accused of rude methods as a landlord. Despite several attempts, Conle, who is supposed to be in Switzerland or London, has yet to be contacted for a statement.
The internal party pressure on the leader of the Weidel parliamentary group is likely to grow again due to the new sanction decision of the Bundestag administration. When the allegations became known, the leader of the parliamentary group Alexander Gauland only clung to it for tactical reasons and a lack of alternatives, but internally he repeatedly expressed his dissatisfaction with the matter of the donation.
The Völkische held back with criticism of the donation issue
In order to consolidate his position, Weidel approached the far-right “wing” and now formally dissolved around the president of the state of Thuringia, Björn Höcke. The Völkische later held back with criticism on the donation issue, while those who were more moderate in comparison resented Weidel’s non-aggression pact with the far right.
Meanwhile, fronts have hardened, Weidel has repeatedly defended the concerns of the party’s völkisch-nationalist wing in recent weeks. The most moderate by comparison are now waiting for the sanction notice from the Bundestag administration, wanting to use it internally against Weidel to dispute his position or at least his main candidate for the Bundestag elections.
Reaction of the AfD to the payment of the fine to Weidel
AfD party spokesman Bastian Behrens said Thursday that the arguments of the Bundestag administration in the decision on the “KV Bodenseekreis” procedure could not be understood by the federal association AfD. Therefore, the federal executive will discuss in its next conference call next Monday whether a lawsuit against this decision will be filed with the Berlin administrative court within a month.
