GERMANY: The hunt for the vanished fortune of East Germany's Socialist Unity Party (SED) has come to an end with untold billions still missing.
The German government is disbanding an inter-party committee that spent 16 years on a treasure hunt through Switzerland, Hungary, Austria and Liechtenstein that yielded €1.6 billion, just a fraction of the money plundered by SED officials.
"What's still hidden would take an awful lot of work to find," said Klaus-Dieter Bennewitz of the inter-party committee created by the first, and last, democratically elected East German (GDR) government to collate the assets of GDR parties.
Mr Bennewitz said he was optimistic that the committee has found a large part of the vanished SED fortune, "but we cannot put a value on what's not been found because we don't know the value ourselves".
The GDR was close to bankruptcy when the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, although the ruling SED had amassed six billion Ostmarks in cash savings alone.
Rather than hand over their fortune to the new unified German government, or lose it by not converting it to Deutschmarks before the final deadline, SED officials spread the wealth as widely and quickly as possible. They topped up the party pension fund, gave indefinite loans to high-ranking members and front companies and made donations to cultural institutions and foundations.
A party secretary showed up at a bank in Luxembourg in the summer of 1990 with three billion Deutschmarks in plastic bags. Some 69 million Deutschmarks was donated to an Islamic group controlled by a Palestinian arms dealer and former PLO terrorist.
By the time the SED changed its name to the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) in 1990 and agreed to divest itself of half its assets, just 205 million Deutschmarks (€105 million) was left.
The inter-party committee criticised the PDS repeatedly over the years, saying the party tried to conceal at least €1 billion worth of assets it inherited from the SED. "The party has no interest in laying plain its fortune," a report said in 1998. That throws light on the party's understanding of democracy."
Since then, the two sides reached a compromise and the PDS handed over most of its inherited SED property, retaining only the buildings that belonged to the Communist Party during the Weimar Republic.
Considering it has worked largely in the dark, the inter-party committee has tracked down considerable sums over the years. It found nearly €400 million in Austria and an ongoing court case in Switzerland could yield another €200 million.
The €1.6 billion it did retrieve has been invested in projects in eastern Germany, as regulated by the Unification Treaty of 1990.
Rumours of secret bank accounts for former SED leaders when two suitcases belonging to party leader Erich Honecker, who died in 1994, surfaced four years ago. Inside were documents showing how, in 1991, the son of a former Stasi general sent funds by a circuitous route to Mr Honecker's wife Margot in Chile, where she still lives.