The head of the list for the European elections of Germany’s AfD, investigated for collecting money from China

The German authorities are investigating whether the head of the far-right party list Alternative for Germany (AfD), Maximilan Krahreceived money from China, the German press reported this Friday.

The newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the public radio and television channels ‘WDR’ and ‘NDR’ report that the German authorities suspect that Krah has received sums of tens of thousands of euros and whether this money comes from the Chinese secret services.

According to these media, Krah, a jurist with a law firm as well as an AfD MEP, would have received some 14,000 euros paid by several companies.

[Detienen al asesor de un eurodiputado ultraderechista alemán por espiar para China]

That money arrived at Krah’s law firm through a collaborator, identified as Jian G.arrested last April on suspicion of having spied for China.

According to him Süddeutsche Zeitungin the police surveillance prior to the arrest of this Krah collaborator, the arrested person “declared having paid his boss a total of more than 50,000 euros”.

“Investigators also suspect that the money did not come from Jian G.’s own assets but from sources within the Chinese secret services,” reported the newspaper published in Munich.

These revelations against Krah add to a cascade of news linked to AfD politicians whose activity has been clouded by the suspicions of corruption and for its political extremism.

On Thursday, the immunity of Petro Bystrom and Hannes Gnauk, two prominent AfD politicians, was lifted.

Bystrom is under suspicion of having received money from the pro-Russian platform Voice of Europe. The offices of this politician were also searched by the Police as part of the investigation against him.

Gnauk is the president of the Young Alternative (JA), the youth organization of the AfD.

The JA was classified last February as a “sure case of right-wing extremism” by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the intelligence services of the Ministry of the Interior.