stooge. The newspaper responded with a smear campaign against the SPÖ, which was considered the first successful campaign by the newspaper. A court case followed between the newspaper and the trade union federation which lasted many years. The ÖGB finally settled with an 11 million Schillings compensation deal, and Kurt Falk took over the 50% from Ferdinand Karpik. Kurt Falk himself left the newspaper after a long fight with Dichand in the 1980s. He sold his shares to the German WAZ media group, which is said to have close connections to the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). In 1989 Hans Mahr, an advisor to Dichand since 1983, took over as manager. Methods used by the newspaper It became apparent soon after the re-establishment of the Krone that the newspaper used unorthodox methods against the competition. Kurt Falk is considered the inventor of the so-called "Sonntagsstandln", which are plastic bags with little money boxes installed on poles on the streets and pavements, containing the Sunday edition (on Sundays, most shops are closed in Austria). This idea, which was derided by the competition in the beginning, quickly caught on and is very popular today. In 1963, Kurt Falk came to a mutual agreement with the competitor at that time Kleines Volksblatt that both papers would change from a small format to broadsheet. The Kleines Volksblatt kept their end of the bargain and changed their format, but the Kronen Zeitung kept their original small format and thereby won 40,000 new readers. When the Kleines Volksblatt subsequently folded, the Krone could not resist poking fun at them for having changed their format in the first place. In 1970, Falk and Dichand bought the tabloid Express, shutting it down after the acquisition. After one of the most important printing houses of Austria, the Pressehaus in Vienna, was sold in 1972 to the BAWAG bank (which in turn had close connections to the social-democratic ÖGB union), the Krone threatened to build its own printing house and thus forced the BAWAG to sell the whole deal to the Krone. In 1995, the Krone sued the Viennese city newspaper Falter for several million Schillings for allegedly having violated the competition laws because of a gaming action. The Falter only barely escaped financial ruin. It is suspected that the Krone tried to shut down the Falter because of its critical reporting of the Krone. In the Austrian National