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The NPD party chairman Frank Franz
Photo: Jan Peters / dpa
The federal chairman of the right-wing extremist NPD, Frank Franz, is being investigated on suspicion of money laundering.
The background to this are dubious financial transactions that the politician is said to have carried out through his now-deleted private company in Austria.
According to a request for legal assistance from the Salzburg public prosecutor to the German judiciary, the issue is Optimaten Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, which Franz founded in 2012 and which went bankrupt in 2016.
As part of the bankruptcy proceedings, Austrian investigators had become aware of a number of suspicious invoices: According to SPIEGEL research, Franz's company demanded, among other things, 15,000 euros from a stock corporation in the Liechtenstein tax haven - for alleged consulting services in the field of media and strategy.
A little later, in June 2014, she issued an advisory invoice for an asset management company in Budapest, Hungary, this time for over 25,000 euros.
Franz's company made several claims against a holding company in the Swiss canton of Thurgau, including invoice no. 139 (»Consulting service media in January 2016«) for 5000 euros, payable to an account at Raiffeisenlandesbank Niederösterreich-Wien.
It is striking that some of the companies that Franz 'Optimaten GmbH allegedly advised on media issues hardly appeared in the media.
So were they bogus bills?
Franz left a SPIEGEL inquiry about the allegations unanswered by the editorial deadline.
Exactly how much money the NPD boss earned with his private company, which last operated under a mailbox address in Vienna, is unclear.
The last publicly available balance sheet relates to 2013 and shows a profit of 122,677.18 euros.
In addition to questionable income, investigators also encountered dubious expenses.
In the spring of 2018, Austrian public prosecutors initiated investigations against Franz and several of his business partners, among other things on suspicion of bankruptcy offenses and money laundering.
In the course of an international mutual legal assistance procedure, the Salzburg public prosecutor has asked the German judiciary to take over the investigation.
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