West Germany’s Biggest Bank to Buy Flick Group

Deutsche Bank, West Germany’s largest commercial bank, said Wednesday that it is acquiring the Flick concern, the giant private holding company implicated in one of the country’s largest corporate bribery cases.

A statement by the bank said it plans to acquire the company from its sole owner, Karl Friedrich Flick, who would first turn the concern into a public stock company.

The statement said Flick offered to sell the holding company to guarantee its long-term development.

Flick said one of the main considerations was the problem of heavy taxes on privately held companies, which he felt could jeopardize the group’s future.

Financial sources said the takeover will be among the biggest in West German history.

The Duesseldorf-based industrial holding company has been implicated in a lengthy political bribery scandal, dubbed the “Flick Affair” by West German media.

Former economics ministers Otto Lambsdorff and Hans Friderichs are on trial on charges of receiving bribes from the Flick group in the mid-1970s. Eberhard von Brauchitsch, a senior Flick manager, is also on trial, accused of giving the bribes to win tax breaks for the company.

The two former ministers are accused of turning the money over to their Free Democratic Party, a junior partner in the government coalition. Lambsdorff and Friderichs are charged with accepting more than $200,000 in bribes from Brauchitsch to arrange tax breaks of up to $192 million.

In 1984, the holding company had net operating earnings of $82 million on sales of $4.2 billion.

No financial details of the takeover were released by Deutsche Bank or Flick.

Flick has industrial and financial holdings spread throughout the world, with a majority interest in more than 60 companies. It employs 42,500 people.

The most important West German units in the Flick group are paper maker Feldmuehle, the chemical company Dynamit Nobel, and Buderus, a steel, weapons and machinery maker.

Flick also has a stake in Daimler-Benz, the West German auto maker whose lines include Mercedes-Benz, and owns 26% of the outstanding common stock of W. R. Grace & Co.