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Hanno Berger
Photo: KAI PFAFFENBACH / REUTERS
After being sentenced to eight years in prison, cum-ex key figure Hanno Berger wants to go to the Federal Court of Justice.
The Bonn district court announced that the 72-year-old had declared that he would appeal.
After delivery of the written judgment, he has one month to justify the appeal.
Last week, the district court sentenced Berger to prison for particularly serious tax evasion in three cases between 2007 and 2011.
The court estimated the tax damage of these three cases at 276 million euros.
Berger received 13.7 million euros, which he has to repay.
The 72-year-old was a driving force in the share deals, in which financial players staged a confusion about the dividend record date and the tax authorities reimbursed unpaid taxes.
The tax lawyer Berger advised banks and mediated investors in order to get large loans with their capital and then be able to invest a lot of money in the cum-ex deals.
Another case is pending before the Wiesbaden district court against Berger in connection with the cum-ex scandal.
The judge suggested that Berger refrain from appealing
When the verdict was announced in Bonn, the presiding judge, Roland Zickler, suggested that the accused should consider forgoing an appeal.
The judge drew his attention to a paragraph in the Code of Criminal Procedure, according to which a judgment from one criminal case could have a mitigating effect on another case - even the termination of the other case would then be possible.
However, this presupposes that the judgment from the first procedure is final.
After the Bonn verdict, Berger's lawyer Richard Beyer said that in relation to the court's findings, the verdict was a guilty verdict "which must be regarded as culpable and appropriate to the punishment."
hey/dpa
