With the single currency, the Tobin tax would have to be levied in the whole euro area. Karl-Heinz Schreiber is the man who launched the whole scandal when he revealed that he had given a suitcase containing DM 1 million in cash to the CDU in 1991. A further secret cash donation by him to the CDU, this time of DM 100,000 has now been revealed and the present leader of the party, Wolfgang Schauble, has now been forced to admit that he received it although he insists that the donation was correctly recorded in the party's accounts. The problem with the Schreiber donation is that the provenance of all sums above DM 20,000 has to be declared, according to German law. Schauble is also in hot water because it is now known that he presided over the payment of DM 1.15 million from the parliamentary party, of which he was the leader, to the secret bank accounts of the central party apparatus.
German law forbids such transfers.
A series of improbable explanations has been given to justify this transfer, each less convincing than the other. The worst came when it was claimed that the money had belonged to the central party since the 1970s and that it had just been borrowed. But, as Der Spiegel pointed out, this amounts to saying that the parliamentary party can be used as a money-laundering operation because parliamentary groups do not have to publish the origin of their donations. It would, according to this logic, be sufficient to give money to the parliamentary party instead of to the central party in order to launder it. Eastern Europe Belarusian opposition celebrates Stalin's Birthday Representatives of the leading opposition party in Belarus, the Belarusian Communist Party, laid flowers at the monument commemorating the Soviet victory in World War II to mark the 120th anniversary of the birth of Joseph Stalin, on 21st December.