Photo Gallery The Swiss Connection
August von Finck, Jr., a German billionaire who lives in Switzerland, is suspected of having bankrolled the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany. The party may have relied on his help to launch in the first place.
Finck lives in Weinfelden Castle, located on the Swiss side of Lake Constance. He moved to Switzerland because of the lower tax bill, but he never lost an interest in German politics.
One form of support for the AfD which may lead back to Finck came in the form of event invoices being paid by outside supporters and not by the party itself. Such as this one.
A lot of that support came nominally from Dagmar Metzger, who is a member of the AfD party today. She ran a marketing agency that paid numerous AfD invoices -- and she has close ties with Ernst Knut Stahl, Finck's right-hand man.
Ernst Knut Stahl apparently is behind the founding of a newspaper called the Deutschland Kurier, which is essentially a propaganda rag for the AfD, but which the AfD itself does not fund. Stahl has been Finck's asset manager for many years.
Another link between the AfD and Finck came in the form of the party's gold shop a few years ago. At the height of the euro crisis, the right-wing party began selling as a way of generating revenues. Its partner? The company Degussa, which is owned by Finck.
Former AfD leaders Frauke Petry and Bernd Lucke. A professor of economics, Lucke claims not to know that Degussa was owned by August von Finck.
An initial meeting called to discuss the establishment of a right-wing AfD fan-paper called the Deutschland Kurier apparently didn't pan out. But a few months later, the rag began showing up in voters' mailboxes.
