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Entrance of the MM Warburg Bank in Hamburg: Judgment against ex-bankers
Photo: Axel Heimken / dpa
In the third criminal trial surrounding the Cum-Ex tax scandal at the Bonn Regional Court, a former banker at the private bank MM Warburg was sentenced to three years and six months in prison.
Due to the length of the proceedings, two months are already considered to have been enforced.
Judge Roland Zickler found the former risk analyst at MM Warburg guilty of two counts of tax evasion this Wednesday.
As managing director of a Warburg investment company, he co-founded two funds aimed at cum-ex transactions to the detriment of the state treasury.
"You were a cog in the works," said the judge.
Without him, this cum-ex project would have come to a standstill.
The public prosecutor had demanded a prison sentence of seven years for the 63-year-old.
His defense advocated a suspended sentence.
Between 2009 and 2010, the cum-ex transactions in which the accused was involved led to tax losses of almost 110 million euros, Zickler said.
It is a particularly serious case.
The complex construction of the transactions showed many characteristics of organized crime.
The public prosecutor had even assumed tax damage of around 150 million euros.
"trying for clarification"
The court credited the defendant with making a late confession during the trial.
"They tried to clarify," said the judge.
In addition, the accused did not enrich himself personally.
He took part in the transactions out of fear for his career.
The defense had emphasized in the process that the ex-banker had not earned a single euro through the transactions and had testified extensively in the process.
The convict Detlef M. had described the business as the "biggest mistake of my professional life".
His defense attorney Ingo Heuel announced that he would examine the written reasons for the judgment and then decide on how to proceed.
The German state suffered billions in damage from the cum-ex deals.
With the deals, investors, banks and stock traders had cheated the German tax authorities out of billions of euros for years.
Shares with (»cum«) and without (»ex«) dividend entitlements were shifted back and forth around the key date.
For these transactions, those involved claimed a capital gains tax refund that they never paid.
The cases had spread widely, which is why there are always searches at banks and law firms.
In March 2020, in Germany's first major criminal case, the court in Bonn imposed suspended sentences on two British stock traders.
This case ended up before the Federal Court of Justice, which confirmed the stance of the Bonn judges last summer.
This decided that Cum-Ex was not just a brazen rip-off exploiting a loophole in the law, but a criminal offence.
A large number of other cum-ex criminal proceedings will keep German courts busy for a long time to come.
Last June, the Bonn Regional Court then sentenced a former employee of the private bank MM Warburg to imprisonment in connection with cum-ex transactions.
The Bonn regional court and the Cologne public prosecutor's office play a central role in processing the cum-ex transactions because the Federal Central Tax Office is based in the former federal capital.
mmq/Reuters