Did Austria’s Meinl Bank help launder $2 billion?

In 1996, Austrian aristocratic scion Julius Meinl  V was ready to move back east.

The Soviet Union had collapsed and Meinl — the fifth in a line of Julius Meinls extending back to the man who founded a luxury grocery company of the same name in 1862 — saw an opportunity. Meinl V began to turn the family company from its focus on groceries for Vienna’s richest into a financial services provider, shutting down the company’s food providers and infusing the family-run bank — Meinl Bank AG — with more cash throughout the 1990s.