Motorists can also buy additives to mix with unleaded petrol.Today the Government is launching a national advertising campaign to make all motorists realise leaded petrol sales cease from 1 January, in compliance with EU law.”Surveys show half of the motorists who might be affected are not yet fully aware, and with those who are, there are terrible scare stories running around saloon bars that they’re going to have to scrap their cars or get rid of them,” Lord Whitty said. Engines that do need adjustment can be fixed in a few minutes in a garage.
For those engines that require petrol with an additive, lead replacement petrol (LRP) will be available on forecourts from the autumn, at no more than the cost of four-star. Despite scare stories, for nearly all drivers the change- over to unleaded fuel will be seamless, said the Transport minister Lord Whitty. Many cars running on leaded petrol will be able to use unleaded with little or no adjustment to the engine, Lord Whitty said.

THE FIVE million British motorists still using leaded petrol were urged by the Government yesterday not to panic about it being banned in five months’ time. He now runs a small property business.Mr Koppenheim said that any compensation he received would be given to the Neve Yerushalyim College in Jerusalem, which educates Jewish girls.. His father died from high blood pressure soon after they arrived in England.The family set up a business making chocolate in Manchester, which Mr Koppenheim went into after he left school in Salford. Even when the family finally left Germany it was forced to pay reichsfluchst steuer, a Jewish exit tax “My mother said this amounted to a hundredweight of silver. When we arrived in England we were penniless,” Mr Koppenheim added.His grandfather, who did not leave Poland, refused to accept that the Germans were deliberately killing Jews and stayed on in Breslau where he died with thousands of others Jews in the ghetto. As recently as 1991, despite protests from Mr Koppenheim and his lawyers, it was sold to a Polish steel manufacturing company.

“We wrote to the Polish government,” said Mr Koppenheim, “and told them what was happening was illegal, but the sale went ahead anyway.”The traumatic events of 1939 are still very much alive in Mr Koppenheim’s mind. His mother managed to escape to England two years earlier, but returned when the German authorities refused to release him and his five sisters. This building was part of the Koppenheim portfolio of properties, later sold to private citizens. He said yesterday: “I asked a taxi driver what had happened to the house and he told me that the Russians had destroyed it to make an example of those who were still resisting.” The taxi driver recounted how a renegade German general had used the house to take shots at the Russians, who then levelled it.His claim also includes compensation or the return of a five-storey office block in central Wroclaw. Mr Koppenheim only learnt of its fate a few years ago when he revisited Wroclaw.

It includes the town mansion his family was forced to flee in 1939. This property was destroyed in the dying days of the Second World War. This week Barclays Bank agreed to pay money to survivors who can prove that their accounts in France were seized after the German invasion.Since the end of Communist rule in Poland the government has embarked on a privatisation programme that has included selling property acquired after the war.Mr Koppenheim’s multi- million-pound claim relates to 11 properties in the former Germany territory, now part of Poland. Mr Urbach said Poland has been slow in passing a law that would allow Holocaust survivors to reclaim property.The legal action comes at a time when other countries, including Britain, are releasing funds deposited by Jews who fled the Holocaust.