http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,754238,00.html "German investigators say they have discovered a massive scandal involving the reintroduction of euro coins that had been taken out of circulation and sold as scrap to China. The scheme, said to have cost Germany's Central Bank €6 million ($8.5 million), involved airline employees -- including Lufthansa flight attendants." Holy smokes. :|
Thanks for the post & link. It reminds me of the train load of guns that BATF delivered to a Bridgeport steel mill to be melted. The mill workers turned-off the furnace as soon as the BATF officers left the mill. All those guns found their way back onto the streets & the BATF got involved again.....
Sounds like after they knock out the centers they need to run either the centers or the rings through a waffler. That would solve the problem. (And before you suggest not bothering to take them apart and just run the whole coin through the waffler, they can probably get a better scrap price if the metals are separated.)
When that story came up here in Germany ("Der Spiegel" reported it in the first week of March), quite a few asked the same question. As for the "waffler", you may know that this is exactly how the old Mark coins were dealt with several years ago, when people turned them in for euro cash. Billions of DM coins went through so-called Decoiner machines, and then the decoined pieces could be transported and sold as scrap metal. But in this case we are not talking about giant amounts. If you bring damaged coins to a Bundesbank branch office, they will check them and give you "fresh" money (cash or not) for them. Pieces with not-so-obvious damages are handed over to the NAZ (National Counterfeit Center; primarily deals with partly burned or otherwise damaged paper money). Anyway, all coins that are considered unfit will then be brought to the mints where they are supposed to be decoined, in one way or another. Apparently they decided that separating the rings and the pills - keep in mind that we are talking about damaged coins - would be enough. Then a company named VEBEG (commercial but owned by the federal government) takes the scrap metal over and sells it in auctions. By the way, VEBEG offers a wide range of stuff; currently you can bid on an Airbus A310 for example. Anybody can buy the pieces of the former coins there. And scrap metal going to China, that is not exactly new and thus not suspicious by itself. Problem is that nobody had apparently taken into account that it could be profitable for criminals to then "re-coin" the pieces and have them flown to Germany, or do the "re-coining" right here. This way the whole process started again: The reassembled pieces would be turned in, considered to be real but damaged coins, and whoever turns them in gets the face value - in real money. And yes, now that everybody knows how the deals worked, the mints will probably use the decoiners again ... Christian
