Withdrawing cash by the suitcase is rare - an elderly lady doing it 51 times for the communist party of Austria, well...

Did you know that, for many years, Austria's richest political party was the Communist Party?
 
It was an Austrian newspaper that reported the end of a saga from the heady days of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain in 1989.

The main proponents of the story were an elderly Austrian lady who was the trustee of the finances of the Communist Party of Austria, the East German import and export company Novum, assorted banks in Austria and Switzerland, and the post reunification German government.

When the Wall came down, the lady managed to get the funds of Novum transferred from then socialist East Germany to a bank in Vienna. Once there, the series of cash withdrawals mentioned in the title of the post followed, and the money disappeared.

In around 1992, the German government claimed that Novum and its funds belonged to the German state. In 2009, the suitcase lady settled with the German government out of court - she transferred 106 million Euros in a deal that averted prosecution.

In a separate action, the German government sued the bank that had let her take out the money and won a settlement of 254 million Euros. The bank appealed and Germany's Bundesgerichtshof recently rejected the bank's final appeal (case number III Zr 77/16).

The roots of the saga date back to a period after World War II, when communist traders set up a number of import/export firms in Austria's Soviet occupied zone. Discreet agreements with the Austrian communist party were set up to establish a trustee structure, and commissions and profits began to flow into the coffers of the Austrian Communist Party. Eventually, the party controlled a total of about one hundred companies and commercial entities operating in the often murky waters of trade with Warsaw Pact countries.

Despite recovering 254 million Euros from Novum's bank, the actual sum recovered is only around 135 million, the rest is interest for the almost 25 years since the money went to Vienna.

Butt Novum was only one of several entities under an East German organization known as KoKo (short for Kommerzielle Koordinierung, commercial coordination). KoKo was responsible for obtaining hard foreign currency, mostly Deutschmark, for the East German government.

KoKo had its fingers in all sorts of deals and businesses, from simple export business to circumvention of Western economic sanctions, to arms deals, to providing prison labor to produce IKEA furniture, and to what can only be called human trafficking: releasing East German prisoners to the West for a standard fee of some 40 000 Deutschmarks per person.

The long time head of KoKo, Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski, left the East for West Germany shortly after reunification, stating fears for his life.

Some of his more hilarious ventures as chief of KoKo included the acquisition of a vacation resort on the Spanish island of Fuerteventura and the world famous Zermatt, Switzerland, cable car line.
All done through front companies, he then rented out the Spanish resort to a West German package holidays company - with the result that West German workers and middle class vacationers unwittingly helped finance the East German government.

Despite numerous attempts to prosecute him for illegal activities, almost all charges were eventually dropped, and only one conviction for arms dealing stuck. He was fined and given probation.

He died, aged 82, in 2015 in his property on posh lake Tegernsee in the southern state of Bavaria, most of his deals and activities never fully explained and cleared up.

Legend has it that he never knew why the West German intelligence agency BND had given him the code name Snow White.