more traceable, making it more likely they will get caught, he said. At a conference on terrorist financing in London, the Head of Europol, Rob Wainwright, called on the European Central Bank (ECB) to look at whether it “should continue to produce and circulate these notes that make it easier for criminals and terrorists to hide their business and to fund illegal activities”. According to Europol, the purple €500 note accounts for 30% of the value of all the euro notes in circulation, although most people have never seen one. The €500 note was introduced in 2002 when the euro was born: it replaced the 1,000 Deutschmark, the 10,000 Belgian franc and the 500,000 Italian lira. Several European countries favoured high- value banknotes. “It is definitely a preference that has been there for a long time,” says Pia Hüttl, an affiliate fellow at the Bruegel thinktank. “The preference is based on the idea that cash has a lower cost and is accepted everywhere.” Cash remains king in Germany and Austria, where more than half of all transactions are made with paper money and coins. The former president of Germany’s constitutional court, Hans-Jürgen Papier, told Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that restrictions on cash were at odds with individual freedom, while tabloid newspaper Bild has launched a petition in defence of paper money, including the €500