Word: germanic
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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...
...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...
Most of the CBL contracts with German municipal authorities were concluded in the late '90s. After a while, the IRS caught on to what was clearly a tax scam on the part of the American investors. The tax write-off applied to purchases of foreign infrastructure assets. But the German assets were not purchased; they were being leased. So in 2004 the loophole was closed...
...German towns and cities are appealing to the German government to bail them out. In March, a group of municipal authorities appealed to the Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau, or KfW, Germany's Marshall Fund-era state-owned bank for reconstruction and development, to buy out AIG and replace it as their credit insurer. The plan might work, but KfW is reluctant. "We are looking into the matter," a KfW spokeswoman says...