FRANKFURT, Germany, May 26 (UPI) -- U.S. financier and political activist George Soros is bidding for a crippled German bank at the very time the nation's political left is bemoaning such moves.
The move by Soros, a billionaire who is teaming with former Goldman Sachs banker Christopher Flowers to take over Frankfurt's ailing AHBR mortgage bank, comes just days after the head of the Social Democrats blasted Anglo-American investors as "locusts."
A Soros-Flowers consortium that owns 50 percent of the bank's stock is calling for the "highest price" for its share -- regardless of political ramifications, the Telegraph reported Thursday.
Germany's private banks engaged in reckless lending during the 1990s to keep pace with the state-guaranteed Landesbanken, which were able to use their top-notch credit ratings to lend cheaply, the newspaper said.
However, falling property prices after the dotcom bubble burst in 2001 left a trail of wreckage through the German banking system that has attracted investors, many of them from Britain and the United States.
Soros is widely known in the United States for his support of liberal causes.
