Leipzig, Germany  - German judges have awarded Holocaust victims and other people persecuted by the Nazis a major increase in compensation payouts for losing their businesses, according to a justice spokesman Friday.

The Nazis forbade Jews to own valuable assets, forcing them to sell holdings quickly at less than true market value. That injustice is being gradually fixed by an arm of the German Finance Ministry.

The federal administrative-law tribunal in Leipzig instructed the compensation office to use a more generous way of calculating the 1930s value of an interest in a business.

A tribunal spokeswoman said the July 17 ruling, which was not made public at first, criticized the office for treating all shareholdings of less than 50 per cent as mere securities worth the market price of the shares only.

The unnamed claimant in the case had been offered only a few tens of thousands of euros for a fire-sale of a stake in a German wiremaking company, Deutsche Kabelwerke AG, which was wiped out in the Second World War.

The judges said the proper compensation should be around 700,000 euros (1 million dollars) plus interest, calculated from the pre-War asset value of the firm, not from the price of its shares.

The spokeswoman said the case had set a precedent.

A lawyer who brought the case said it would increase payouts for a few claimants 20-fold.(dpa)