HOW SCOTTISH TAXPAYERS CAME TO BE FUNDING GERMANY'S FAR-RIGHT

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.

WOMEN - ONE MAN'S PERSPECTIVE

 

[This is an extract from my book 'OUTSPOKEN – Part One' (available by clicking the link in the title). It is posted to mark International Women's Day.]

As I have got older, my respect for women has continued to grow, and I decided to write this after seeing statistics that shocked me.

I've never understood why some men assault women, particularly women they claim to love. In just 12 months, there were 51,926 incidents of domestic abuse recorded by police in Scotland. Of course, some women don't report being physically or psychologically abused by their partner. On average, women are on the receiving end of domestic abuse 35 times before they report it to police or social services.

North Ayrshire, my local area, has one of the highest rates of domestic abuse in Scotland: a report by the local council put the annual cost of dealing with the problem at around £2.9million.

Over just one-year the rate of domestic abuse incidents responded to by the police in North Ayrshire increased by 90.5% - from 996 to 1,897. Worryingly, the Council recorded that the high rate of domestic abuse has not translated into increased 'homeless' applications for housing, indicating that, in many cases, women are remaining in the home where abuse has occurred.

For the same period, North Ayrshire Women's Aid figures show 95 women and 60 children stayed in local refuges operated by the charity. In addition, 588 women were provided with counselling support.

Alcohol plays a part in men assaulting their partners, but it is no excuse. No-one forces men to get drunk and then take out their frustrations by physically assaulting women. One formidable woman I worked with in the past, former SNP Chief Whip Kay Ullrich, summed-up the paucity of the “But I was drunk” excuse, by asking, “So why did he wait to get home before he decided to punch someone's face in? Why didn't he have a go at the guy standing next to him in the pub?”

In my life there have always been strong women. My maternal granny was a socialist activist in the Independent Labour Party in the Saltcoats area. My paternal granny was undoubtedly the boss in a household that included a husband and six sons.

When I was a politician, my mother was my staunchest defender and supporter – she could also criticise me, but no-one else was allowed to do it. She was physically small, but would have faced a lion to defend her two sons (albeit one needed more defending than the other).

I'm delighted that my daughter is following in the tradition: she is beautiful, intelligent, articulate and funny. She is more than a match for any man.

The human race would have expired centuries ago if child-bearing was not something done by women. Men could never endure the physical pain and stress of giving birth.

Women raise families, run households and have careers. Amazingly, they also find time to 'look good' because men expect that of them, even while our beer-bellies swell and forests of hair emerge from our ears and nose.

During my time as an MSP, I served alongside women who were there entirely on merit and proved themselves to be amongst the best politicians in the country.

Then there was my pal, Margo. Despite suffering from a terrible debilitating illness, Margo MacDonald was the brightest star in the parliament. She was so intelligent, so articulate and so funny.

All the women I served alongside were there through ability and determination, and they proved their sex was an asset, not a hindrance.

It is a misconceived belief of superiority that leads some men to think women are less than their equal. From my experience, in work, in politics, in life in general, women constantly prove themselves to be more than equal to men. When a problem arises, men will form a committee to look at setting-up a focus group that could examine possible options for inclusion in a brainstorming session to set-out ideas that might feed into a matrix of potential solutions. Women will identify the problem and sort it out.

There is no doubt in my mind that women are the stronger sex. Of course, physically, men are generally bigger and stronger, which is a major factor in the appalling statistics relating to domestic abuse. On that point, one final thought: as a young man, my late dad served in the Royal Marines. He was trained to kill with his bare hands, but when I was a wee boy he told me that real men never hit women. That message has stayed with me to this day.

So, to any men who might, in the future, find themselves feeling they want to hurt a woman they claim to love – or any woman – please pause, take a step back and be a real man. Real men don't hit women.