You've basically got enough information to fill three 3x5 inch index cards, and it's anyone's guess where this goes.
Back in the spring of 2020....all this German hype came up over masks, and by July, they (the Bundestag and Merkel's team) were ready to mandate the wear of masks.
The general problem? On the commercial market, no one was prepared for demand required.
I had sat there in March of 2020....figuring this mandate would occur, and had gone to Amazon to order up a surgical mask box (50 masks) for a very reasonable price. As summer approached and the mandate occurred? Well...that same box had tripled in price (if you could find it).
To be blunt, I could have bought twenty pallets of masks back in February and at the key point of June/July....started selling these on the street for triple the original costs.
So to the CDU/CSU crisis.....some CDU/CSU folks (actual members of the Bundestag)....saw this window of opportunity, and being businessmen....went and procured masks.....selling them at a profit.
Their profit-making has come into full public view, and the opposition parties are furious....you can't have members of the Bundestag making profit (at least in this way).
Two guys have been identified, and both are leaving the election process.
More to come? The rumor is that.
How much did the two make? One is suggested to have made around 250k Euro (it's questionable if this is accurate, and if you figure taxation.....they went home with only 60-percent of that amount). The second guy is unknown on profit.
The suggestion that maybe five or six more guys were into this profit-making? Unknown.....strictly rumors, and you'd need a truth-commission to dig into this.
The problem here...it's simply NOT illegal to go and order 300 pallets of masks from the Philippines back in June of 2020, to fill a requirement in Baden-Wurttemberg or Berlin. You could have been Russian mafia in Germany, environmentalists, farmers, gay disco owners, or even college students.
Will the scandal hurt the CDU in September's national election? One can only guess at this, and I might assume there's a two-point loss in the mix.....in terms of votes.
The fact that no Linke Party, no Green Party, and no SPD Party were involved in mask procurement? It begs the question....why didn't they get involved? If I'd had access to a small warehouse....I would have easily had the capital to buy forty-odd pallets, and probably make 50k Euro in profit....just by selling stupid masks.
If you remember the early days of the FFP-2 mandate (end of 2020).....a mask that costs around 40 cents to make, and should have been around 95 cents at the local grocery....was in short supply and selling for 4.50 Euro at pharmacy operations (that went on for about four weeks, but retreating to 2.50 Euro for a month, and finally around the 10th week....it was down to 1 Euro per mask).
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