The English version of the intelligence service reports mentioned below can be accessed onleine here: http://www.bmi.bund.de/downloads/VSB1999_englisch.pdf
Johannes
Postbank Axes Accounts on Left and Right
By Heinz Stüwe
BONN. One week after Postbank, the German postal service's banking arm, closed an account belonging to the Berlin-based right-wing publication Junge Freiheit , the bank said Thursday that it had also closed the accounts of numerous left-wing groups. Postbank spokesman Joachim Strunk, however, said the bank's secrecy policy would not allow it to release the names of those groups.
Mr. Strunk did say that "a considerable number of accounts," had been cancelled. Because of the bank's low profile and reasonable fees many extremist groups and organizations on both sides of the political spectrum have sought refuge at Postbank.
The bank first announced last August amid a summer of highly publicized right-wing violence that it would close the accounts of right-wing extremists. In a letter to a German journalists' association, Journalisten-Verband Berlin, Postbank said it had decided last year to terminate business relations with radical parties, organizations and publishing houses. "We want this to be understood as a sign against violence and xenophobia," the letter said.
Mr. Strunk said the criticism that followed last week's decision to cancel the account of Junge Freiheit was unfounded. In this case the decisive factor was the publication's mention in German intelligence service reports in 1998 and 1999, he said.
In the 1998 report, intelligence authorities said the weekly newspaper was contributing to an ideological merging of democrats and extremists. "The paper publishes articles by democrats and, at the same time, by German and foreign right-wing extremists," the report said.
According to Postbank, it is not the only bank that consults intelligence reports in such cases. Closing the account is no attack on the freedom of information, Mr. Strunk said.
With 3,500 different banks existing in Germany, the closure would not mean the paper's ruin. In the latest wave of account closures, Postbank included not only right-wing extremist parties such as the National Democratic Party, but also those publishing houses that are regarded as closely allied to them. But in a financial sense, such publishers were not "uninteresting customers," the bank said.
Postbank has no doubts that its account cancellations are legal. Although its parent company, Deutsche Post, went public, Postbank is still mainly government-owned. Since 1995, when the bank was turned into a joint-stock company, it has not been under the obligation to contract. This was affirmed by a regional court in Cologne in a decision last November, when it rejected the petition for a temporary injunction of publishing house Deutsche Stimme Verlagsgesellschaft against Postbank.
The judges referred to the jurisdiction of Germany's Federal Court of Justice. Under this jurisdiction, no objections can be made against a closure option for transfer and depot contracts in the bank's rules governing the conduct of business.