GERMANY
Independent (UK)
Germany’s 11th-century Neresheim Abbey is normally an oasis of calm where monks guide city dwellers in religious contemplation and offer an opportunity to dine on country fare in the monastery’s rustic Swabian restaurant.
But the Benedictine abbey set in the hills of the southern state of Baden Württemberg was immersed in an embarrassing scandal yesterday involving the discovery of unaccounted-for millions and allegations of systematic money laundering.
The source of the trouble was traced at the weekend to part of the estate left by the late abbot, Norbert Stoffels, who was Nereseheim’s guiding spiritual light from 1977 until his death in 2012.
His successor, Father Albert Knebel, admitted that he had discovered an unaccounted-for “fortune” amounting to €4m in the estate left by Abbot Norbert. “The fortune was neither registered on the abbey’s accounts, nor was anyone in the administration or any of my fellow brothers aware of its existence,” declared Father Knebel. “Our foremost concern is to find out where this money comes from,” he said in a statement.
The plot surrounding the unaccounted-for millions assumed sinister proportions yesterday: state prosecutors in Krefeld in northern Germany confirmed they had opened an investigation on suspicion the cash stemmed from a money-laundering operation.
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