Anyone who has ever been accused of wasting money with the phrase “flushed it down the toilet” will likely be tickled to know that somewhere in Switzerland, two women have taken that old adage quite seriously.
Following a report from UBS that concluded that rich people were just a little too flush with cash — sorry, there are going to be a lot of these — two women in Geneva decided to give some of their cash a flush. Swiss prosecutors are trying to figure out why two women would flush around €100,000 ($119,000) in cut-up €500 bank notes down a toilet back in May.
Well, technically a few toilets — one at a UBS branch in Geneva as well as in toilets at three neighboring restaurants.
Local authorities were called in because toilets were not designed to handle deposits of this kind — and, as a result, the plumbing was damaged, according to Vincent Derouand, spokesman for the Geneva prosecutor’s office. Video surveillance managed to capture the two women, who have offered to pay for the several thousand francs worth of damage to the businesses whose toilets they destroyed.
Why? That remains a mystery. It is not technically a crime to destroy currency in Switzerland, but prosecutors are investigating anyway to see if the flushed cash has criminal connections.
The European Central Bank will stop issuing new €500 notes — the type of currency that was destroyed — at the end of next year. However, the notes will remain legal tender.
Except, of course, for the ones that were shredded and flushed. Those have been lost to posterity. And while we are sure someone in Europe might have liked all those euros, we are also sure there was a very good reason to send them to the sewers instead.
We can’t wait to hear what it might have been.
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