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Carsten Maschmeyer: At the FDP in a donation mood
Photo: Henning Kaiser / dpa
One and a half weeks before the federal election, the FDP receives a financial injection from a prominent source: Carsten Maschmeyer donated 200,000 euros to the party.
This emerges from a publication on the Bundestag website.
FDP treasurer Harald Christ confirmed the receipt of the donation from the TV investor to SPIEGEL.
Maschmeyer is best known today because of his role as an investor in the TV program "Die Höhle der Löwen".
There he appears together with Georg Kofler, the former head of the TV station ProSieben.
He in turn donated 750,000 euros to the FDP in April.
In support of this, Kofler said at the time that the FDP represented "entrepreneurs, founders and advancement-oriented people in Germany" best.
He also wants to "prevent the Greens from participating in government."
Compared to other large donations in recent months, Maschmeyer's 200,000 euros seem almost modest:
At the beginning of September, the Greens received a record donation: the Dutch technology and media entrepreneur Steven Schuurman gave the party 1.25 million euros.
In April, the software developer
Moritz Schmidt transferred
one million euros from Bitcoin profits to the Greens.
He told SPIEGEL that he was looking for an ethical way of spending the "undeserved" money.
The real estate entrepreneur
Christoph Kahl
donated 500,000 euros to the CDU in June.
He has been one of the party's financial supporters for years.
The pharmaceutical heir
Antonis Schwarz also
donated half a million euros
to the Greens in February.
He is the founder of the Guerilla Foundation, which, according to his own statements, wants to bring about a "major systemic change in Europe" through the support of "activists and grassroots social movements".
Large donations over 50,000 euros must be published immediately.
Never since the introduction of the disclosure requirement in 2002 have so many large donations been made as this year.
At the end of August, the number and volume of large donations were already higher than in all previous years - until the end of each year.
ulz / csc / ply
