Discussions about restrictions on cash are like a stab in a wasp’s nest in Austria. When EU financial market commissioner Mairead McGuinness announced in an interview at the beginning of the week that she would raise an upper limit for cash payments of 10,000 euros to combat money laundering, Finance Minister Gernot Blümel (ÖVP) immediately rejected the initiative. “We will not accept a creeping abolition of cash”, he emphasized reflexively and added that coins and notes were “still the most important and preferred means of payment, especially in Austria”.
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