There has apparently been a raid on the AfD party headquarters in Berlin. It is supposed to go into illegal party financing
The Berlin public prosecutor searched the federal office of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party on Wednesday. The authority confirmed this after the party had informed about the raid.
It is therefore about investigations against the former party leader Jörg Meuthen and the former Federal Treasurer Klaus-Günther Fohrmann. Meuthen’s immunity as a member of the European Parliament had already been lifted in February.
The search is related to possibly illegal party funding in the years 2016 to 2018. The reports are said to contain “allegedly incorrect information regarding party donations,” according to the public prosecutor.
Rooms at seven locations in Berlin, Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia were searched. According to the information, numerous police officers from Berlin and other federal states as well as three public prosecutors were involved.
In addition to the AfD headquarters for information from judicial circles, rooms of the advertising space marketer Ströer were also searched. The company confirmed this when asked by the DPA news agency. “Spiegel”, ZDF and “Correctiv” reported a year ago that Ströer had received orders for official AfD election posters and orders for thousands of posters from a supporter association, which also called for the AfD elections, under the same customer numbers in previous elections. The AfD had denied agreements with the club. The question is whether there were connections after all, whether party financing regulations were violated and whether statements of accounts are incorrect.
AfD leadership criticizes the raid by the Berlin public prosecutor’s office
According to AfD co-head Tino Chrupalla, the authorities copied “entire hard drives, mailboxes and file folders”. He complained that the public prosecutor’s office had not asked in advance for the release of the data. According to the public prosecutor’s office, the data carriers are now to be evaluated.
In a statement, the AfD leadership sharply criticized the investigators’ approach. Chrupalla’s co-party leader Alice Weidel called the search an “extremely unusual and extremely disproportionate measure to intimidate the AfD as the most important opposition party”.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated and supplemented several times since it was first published.
Sources: , , , DPA and AFP news agencies
Source: Stern
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