As of: March 27, 2024, 10:36 p.m
By: Bona Hyun
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One of the German Sparkasse branches apparently refused to make a payment to the AfD. An anonymous insider speaks of a “method.”
Berlin – The Sparkasse Mittelfranken Süd recently made headlines: According to reports, the credit institution refused a customer a payment of 430 euros to the AfD. The payment recipient has “a right-wing extremist orientation.” Such payments would not be accepted and the customer should stop them “in their own interest,” Die
Welt
and
FinanzBusiness
, among others, quoted from the internal document. Now a whistleblower has come forward.
Sparkasse refuses payment to AfD – Insider refutes “oversight”
At the time, the savings bank apologized for the incident, spoke of a “human oversight” and admitted: “As a public credit institution, we provide all social groups and people, regardless of their political goals, with access to credit services.” Parties and associations whose unconstitutionality has been legally established. “A payment to the AfD is therefore possible.”
The AfD claims that a whistleblower reported to the party about the incident at the Sparkasse Mittelfranken-Süd. © Jonathan Penschek/dpa/mix1/imago
According to
FinanzBusiness
, the AfD parliamentary group now claims that a whistleblower has now reported to them about the incident. According to the whistleblower, the whole thing at the Sparkasse wasn't an accident - there was a method behind it. Corresponding software, which is used to identify suspected cases of money laundering, is programmed so that it sounds the alarm when the code word AfD is heard.
When asked by
Ippen.Media,
a spokesman for Sparkasse Mittelfranken-Süd said: “Payment transactions are subject to a variety of legal guidelines, from the Money Laundering Act to interpretation and application instructions from the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority to the requirements of the Financial Intelligence Unit. We stick to that. For security reasons, we do not provide any information about details in our systems.”
AfD goes on the offensive after the incident at Sparkasse – and relies on whistleblowers
The entire incident is a hit for the AfD. The financial policy spokesman for the AfD parliamentary group, Kay Gottschalk, described the actions of the Sparkasse Mittelfranken Süd as “scandalous”. “In the future, AfD donors could receive unpleasant letters from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution that will discourage them from donating,” said Gottschalk.
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In mid-March, the party made a small inquiry to the federal government and wanted to know what information it had about “threatening letters from savings banks”, “for example from the Sparkasse Mittelfranken Süd to its customers, because they instructed donations to be transferred to the AfD”. The MPs also asked what specific error, according to the federal government's findings, led to the letter. There has not yet been a public response from the federal government.
Sparkasse in the AfD dilemma: “We are party-politically neutral, but not value-neutral”
Already in January, a statement by the President of the Sparkasse Association DSGV regarding the neutrality requirement caused quite a stir. “When it comes to our free, democratic basic order, we savings banks cannot be neutral,” said President Ulrich Reuter at the time.
However, in the Frankfurt business journalists' club ICFW, he also admitted that the savings banks are in a dilemma with their commitment to basic values. As financial institutions supported by municipalities, savings banks have a public mandate and are obliged, for example, to offer all citizens an account upon request.
Savings banks could therefore not rule out offering an account to extreme parties. “But we don’t have to be friendly about it,” he added with a bit of gallows humor and summed up the savings bank’s position with the motto: “We are party-politically neutral, but not value-neutral.”
Co-chief of AfD complains about termination of account at Postbank
A few months ago, AfD co-chair Tino Chrupalla also claimed that Postbank had canceled his account because of his role in the party. Due to banking secrecy, the institute did not comment on this, and Chrupalla did not provide any evidence to support his claim. At the request of the
world
had
A spokesman for the Deutsche Bank brand pointed out that it does not comment on individual customer relationships due to banking secrecy. Therefore, she cannot say anything about the actual reasons for a possible termination.