500 euro note 26 April 2019. “Authorities increasingly suspect that they (€500 notes) are being used for illegal purposes, an argument that we can no longer ignore,” according to a high-ranking bank official, Benoît Cœuré. The euro was founded on 1 January 1999, when it became the currency of over 300 million people in Europe. For the first three years of its existence it was an invisible currency, only used in accountancy. Euro cash was not introduced until 1 January 2002, when it replaced the national banknotes and coins of the countries in eurozone 12, such as the Luxembourgish franc. Slovenia joined the
International status and usage of the euro would replace the US dollar with the euro as its official currency for the purposes of international trading. On 1 December 2002, North Korea did the same. (Its internal currency, the wŏn, is not convertible and thus cannot be used to purchase foreign goods. The euro also enjoys popularity domestically, especially among elites and resident foreigners.) Syria followed suit in 2006. In 2000, President of Iraq Saddam Hussein began the sale of his country's oil denominated in euros rather than US dollars since the majority of Iraqi oil trade was with the EU, India and China rather than the United