This is an extract from my book, 'OUTSPOKEN – Part Two'. Click the link to order.
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In June, 2005, North Ayrshire Council announced that First Class Consortium (FCS) was the preferred bidder for its Public Private Partnership (PPP) deal to build four new schools.
The Council subsequently issued a press release, advising that FCS had been awarded the contract. The press release gave the value of the contract as £80m. However, this figure actually only represented the capital cost, the amount it would take to build the schools. In another press release, the German construction company Hochtief announced it had been awarded the North Ayrshire contract, and gave the total value as £380m.
Hochtief was the main component-part of First Class Consortium, and the figure it gave represented the £80m construction cost plus £300m for a 30-year contract to maintain the school buildings.
Before this stage in the North Ayrshire Schools PPP Project was reached, the Council had embarked on a procurement process that has since been recognised as Scotland's biggest PFI/PPP scandal.
PFI stood for the Private Finance Initiative, a system of procuring and paying for public contracts, initially introduced by the Conservative UK Government led by John Major. The system was rebranded as Public Private Partnerships by the New Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. It was under New Labour that PPP was massively expanded. Councils and health boards seeking to build new schools and hospitals were not only encouraged to use PPP, they were effectively told it was 'the only game in town', the only way they would receive central government funding to help pay for construction projects.
The shocking truth of what actually happened during the procurement process for the North Ayrshire Schools PPP Project is told in two documentaries - 'The Only Game In Town' and 'The Only Game In Town 2 - The Cover-Up'.
Two key outcomes of the process, however, are that the procurement saw First Class Consortium/Hochtief awarded the multi-million-pound contract without ever facing any competition. Also, the figure of £380m, quoted by Hochtief in its press release on FCS being awarded the contract, is an understatement of the total cost to the public purse. The detail of the contract shows payments to the private-sector companies within the consortium increase year-on-year. At the moment, taxpayers are forking-out over £1m every month to service the North Ayrshire PPP debt. In total, by the time the contract ends in 2037, the public will have paid considerably over £400m for schools valued at just £80m when new.
Much of the content in the two documentaries mentioned above relates to the 'second bid', which North Ayrshire Council claimed provided genuine competition for its multi-million-pound Schools PPP contract. Watch the films and decide for yourself about that claim. This article, for the first time, focuses on the successful bid, the one from First Class Consortium. More specifically, it focuses on the consortium's largest component-part, the German construction firm Hochtief, and on the man who provided financial backing for the company.
Hochtief has been a very successful company in the field of construction since the early part of the 20th Century. At the time of its successful bid for the North Ayrshire PPP Contract, one of its major shareholders was a German businessman called August von Finck, who inherited much of his wealth from his father, also called August, who died in 1980. The family wealth originated with August senior's father, Wilhelm von Finck, who, in the 1880s, co-founded the bank Merk Finck and Co, and the Allianz Insurance company.
August von Finck senior was one of Germany's most successful businessmen during the 1930s, and poured money into backing Adolf Hitler's rise to power. In 1931, August von Finck and other like-minded businessmen met with Hitler in Berlin's Hotel Kaiserhof. They promised the Nazi leader 25m-Reichsmark to help his campaign to become Chancellor of Germany. This figure, today, would be the equivalent of around £85m. In February 1933, a month after President von Hindenburg had appointed Hitler as Chancellor, von Finck and the other businessmen provided the Nazi leader with another sum, equivalent today to around £2.5m.
August von Finck was rewarded by Hitler for his financial support, benefiting greatly from what the Nazi's called 'Aryanisation', which was where Jewish property and wealth was seized and handed-over to prominent members of the Nazi Party. One significant 'gift' from Hitler to von Finck occurred following the Nazi annexation of Austria, with the businessman handed control of the Jewish-owned bank, Rothschild.
August von Finck's construction company also benefited from its close links with the Nazis. In a recent statement, Hochtief said, “In the 30s and 40s of the last century, Hochtief, as a large German construction company, was involved in construction projects of the Nazi period. Hochtief is aware of its historical and moral responsibility.”
The statement reads as if Hochtief accidentally found itself doing a few building jobs during the “Nazi period” that it now, with hindsight, regrets. This is far from the truth. Hochtief was Hitler's favourite builder, constructing, among other things, the massive Nazi arena in Nuremberg, at which Hitler addressed thousands of his followers during mass rallies. Hochtief also built Hitler's personal alpine retreat, the Berghof, and was so favoured and trusted by Hitler that the company was employed to design and build the Fuhrerbunker in Berlin, the underground building to which the Nazi leader retreated as allied forces entered the German capital towards the end of the war.
As the Nazi's expanded the Third Reich by invading countries across Europe, Hochtief continued to benefit from its close links with Hitler. The construction company was awarded contracts to build infrastructure for the Nazis in occupied countries. Many of the contracts saw Hochtief use slave labour, which consisted of local men rounded-up, transported to Nazi 'camps' and forced to work for meagre rations of food. Today, this is how Hochtief describes its close involvement with the Nazis and its use of slave labour: “On some building sites, Hochtief employed forced labourers and thus incurred a burden of guilt for the wrongs committed during the Third Reich.”
At the end of the war, August von Finck temporarily stood down from some of the senior business positions he held, including management of the family bank, which was handed to a trustee. He did, however, retain his great personal wealth, which had massively increased during his time working closely with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis as they committed atrocities across Europe. By 1948, just three-years after the war ended, von Finck had resumed full control of his businesses.
In 1980, August von Finck died: his enormous wealth passed to his son, August junior, who also inherited his father's stakes in a number of major German companies, including Allianz insurance, the Loewenbraeu AG brewing company and Hochtief construction.
It is now clear that von Finck also inherited his father's political outlook. The rise of the far-right political party, Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), is largely credited to the financial support of August von Finck. Much of the money from von Finck was directed through a 'middleman' organisation called the Association For The Rule Of Law and Civil Liberties, which funded a poster campaign and free newspapers urging a vote for AfD. It is estimated the posters and newspapers would have cost in the region of €10m. The German newspaper, Der Spiegel, has reported on the close-ties between the Association For The Rule Of Law and Civil Liberties and Ernst Knut Stahl, director of August von Finck's financial and property holdings.
Alternative fur Deutschland has been characterised as a German nationalist party, which opposes immigration, is anti-Islam, anti-European Union and denies that climate change is caused by humans. In 2021, German media reported that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) had placed AfD under surveillance as a suspected extremist organisation.
When Hochtief won the multi-million-pound North Ayrshire Schools PPP contract – without any opposing bids – and began receiving multi-million-pound payments from Scottish taxpayers, August von Finck personally owned a 25% stake in the company. Two years after Hochtief won the contract, von Finck sold his stake to the Spanish construction firm Actividades de Construccion y Servicios. The deal netted him €1.3bn.
August von Finck died in November 2021.
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