Word: german
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...contracts are incredibly complicated, a thousand pages and more, and all in English," says Franz-Reinhard Habbel, spokesman for the Federation of German Cities and Municipalities. "Many cities were just out of their depth and unable to understand them...
...there was a risk, and it would end up costing German taxpayers dearly. It related to a term set down in the leasing contracts - massive tomes, written in English, which required the Germans to take out policies with AAA-rated insurers to cover the value of the assets for the life of the lease. Should the insurer lose its top rating, the Germans would have to either find another insurer or, in the worst case, provide additional collateral to guarantee the assets. It was a scenario that no one expected could emerge - until the financial crisis...
...more than two-thirds of the deals, German cities insured their assets with AIG or Lehman Brothers. So after those two pillars of U.S. finance crumbled, German cities suddenly faced the risk of having to make huge payments - taken together, as much as €30 billion ($40 billion), according to some estimates - to their American investors. (Read "Why Berlin Says U.S. 'Bad Bank' Plan...
...public-transportation company in Darmstadt, financed its purchases of new street cars through a similar arrangement. The city of Stuttgart leased and rented back its drinking-water system. Bottrop, a city in the Ruhr industrial region, financed a sewage-treatment plant in the same fashion, and Ulm, a southern German city, did such a deal to pay for construction of a refuse incinerator...
...alcohol on [Dipendra]." According to Paras, the crown prince had intended to take down his popular father ever since Birendra relinquished absolute power after pro-democracy protests in 1990. The loss of that political mandate was made worse for Dipendra after his father scuttled an arms deal with a German riflemaker that could have yielded the prince a windfall of over $1 million. "That was the real trigger," claimed Paras, though former aides to the monarchy have denied such a transaction was ever in the works...