Re: How come there is no government involvation?

Oliver Holmes <holmes> wrote:

>I was wondering, how come there are no moves against Scientology perceptable?
>An I mean no government on earth has so far to my knowledge done anything
>against them!
>Is it because high-ranking officials are part of scientology, and get benefits
>from that (money, women,...)?
>Or is there anybody (except Woody of course) who can give a statement on that?
>This is the first time I looked in to ARS, so don't flame me if this remark
>is stupid.
>Thanks
There has been done a lot (but not enough), but scientologists won't tell you.

The US government did do something against them. There was a huge FBI raid at the end of the 70ies, which led to 11 high-ranking members going to jail. The US government didn't like it that scienos stole documents. There has been something similar in Canada, although I do not know what sentences where decided.

In Spain 70 scienos were arrested, including the breakfast president Heber Jentzsch. They were released on bail, case still pending.

There are also the "small" cases, like two women in Switzerland convicted of selling scientology to a physically and mentally handicapped man, telling him that scientology could better his situation.

There also was a raid in Germany. Here's an except from a tape from Jon Zegel. I do not know when this took place (I think 198x).

[schnip]

Coming up a little closer to present time, I thought we would talk about the recent Church caper in Germany. The OT Committee which is an association of Free Scientologists from around the world was holding a convention in Munich West Germany and the Church fired two missions and 10 detectives to try to disrupt that meeting.

These missions came from COST, the Church Of Spiritual Technology, which is the new alter ego of the Church of Scientology and the RTC, the Religious Technology Center. They discovered that attending this meeting was one Silvie Herman, a former staff member from Munich, and what the missions attempted to do was to collect an affidavit from some of her former staff memeber associates, indicating that perhaps she had mis appropriated funds or embezzled money or some such things while on staff, so that they could present criminal charges against her.

In fact they did collect such an affidavit, they went to the German Police and the German Police came and arrested Silvie Herman and put her in jail. The Free Scientologists that were there, got real real busy when this occurred, gathered up a huge amount of documentation indicating that this was a typical kind of Church activity, that they had submitted false affidavits and so forth in the past, and had this material delivered to the judge prior to the hearing.

When the hearing for Silvie took place, the judge looked through the materials and said that there was considerable question in their minds regarding this particular affidavit. As a result of that he released Silvie on her own recognizance, but unknown to the Church Officials at that time, the State Attorney, which is the next higher level Attorney in the German legal system, had had a meeting with the judge scheduled for just 15 minutes after this trial was to be over.

In fact that meeting took place and a decision was made that there should be a raid against the Orgs in Munich.

The following morning at 8 am, 100 police officers arrived in front of the Munich Org and another 15 or 20 arrived at the local mission.

4500 kilograms of files were taken at the Org. Approximately 300 kilograms of files were taken at the nearby Mission, a total of nearly 5 metric tons of documents.

Of those materials, no pc folders were taken.

After reviewing that information, and looking through the financial records of the Church, a hearing on the status was held and it was found that the Church of Scientology in fact was not a Church at all, but in fact a trade or commercial activity, a for profit corporation in Germany.

Scientology has lost its Church status, they now, all the staff members, have to apply for trade licenses to be Scientologists.

[schnip]

BTW, Jon is probably wrong on the two last paragraphs, this applies only to the Munich org, which was indeed closed by Peter Gauweiler. I don't know if any litigation followed, or if they simply started a new corporation.

Tilman

--- Tilman Hausherr   [Awards: KoX, DB, Koos "seal of approval]

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