Friday, December 03, 2021
At 91 years old
Billionaire August von Finck is dead
He was a colorful figure: the head of a private bank and the owner of a billion-dollar fortune. A tax was derisively named after one of his holdings in a company. Most recently, he was said to be close to the AfD. August von Finck has now died very old.
According to media reports, the entrepreneur August von Finck died. He was therefore 91 years old. The billionaire died a good week ago in London after a brief serious illness, reports the “Münchener Merkur”.
Finck ran the family-owned Munich bank Merck Finck & Co. for years. After selling this and a stake in a brewery, he became the main shareholder in the Swiss restaurant and hotel group Mövenpick. Among other things, he founded Degussa Goldhandel, which temporarily helped to strengthen the AfD’s financial base.
Finck got into the headlines as a party donor. So he gave large sums of money to the FDP and CSU. A little later, as part of the Growth Acceleration Act (2009), the black-yellow coalition lowered the value added tax on hotel accommodation, which became known as the “Mövenpick tax”. Later, according to the “Spiegel”, Finck became involved again for the AfD by having indirectly contributed to the conception of a party-affiliated election campaign newspaper.
In March of this year it became known that Finck had paid the CSU politician and lawyer Peter Gauweiler around eleven million euros for consulting activities during his time as a member of the Bundestag. According to the “Süddeutscher Zeitung”, the politician regularly billed Finck for seven years. Among other things, Finck took part in Gauweiler’s lawsuit against the rescue packages for Greece and the euro before the Federal Constitutional Court.
Finck lived in Switzerland.