A Money Story

 I sat this afternoon and viewed a pretty complicated story via N-TV (commercial German news)

How much of this is in the public view at this point?  It might be argued that this story is going to take off and become a major problem.

So it revolves around this.....there is this town in NW Germany....Osnabrück, and information came to the public prosecutor.  It's about money-laundering.  This started up about a year ago (2020).

The prosecutor stumbles across this 'known' information that involves both the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Finance (both in Berlin, and both run by the SPD Party). It was information that was supposed to go to the police, and lead onto prosecution.  In both cases, they failed (either accidentally or intentionally).

All of this revolves around million Euro transactions which moved via a German bank, leading to Africa....in 2018.  Drug money?  Apparently.

There is a unit in the Finazamt (Ministry of Finance) which was supposed to pass the info over to the police.  But they did nothing. 

So this public prosecutor from Osnabrück did something pretty 'crazy'.  He packaged the problem for a judge, and asked for a search warrant of both the Finance Ministry and Justice Ministry.  

They (the police) showed up with the search warrant, and you can imagine those Ministry folks being pretty shocked.

Right now, the prosecutor staff is evaluating the material taken.  It might be several months before you reach a point where people start to be asked to appear in front of a judge.

Speculation?  You have one of three likely scenarios: (1) a fair number of incompetent or untrained people who work within the monitoring unit of the Finazamt, (2) some banking people or money-laundering establishment paid off this unit to just do 'nothing', or (3) the transfers of money seemed to fit within a legit movement of money.  

There are a hundred different ways that you could go and move money out of Germany without involving banks or being noticed on transfers.  So it's a bit puzzling to me why some idiot choose a particular way to do this....in full view....hoping that nothing would be noticed.  That's the part of the story which makes no sense.

A lot of the drug gangs or criminal clans now take their profits and drive them into construction or real estate projects....which is another angle to this whole story. 

This will be openly discussed tonight....probably as a top three type story, but only leading to speculation.  The fact that both ministries are run by SPD politicians?  Well....yeah, that is a bit odd (just before an election) to tell this story.