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The summer fairy tale files: Insight into internal documents on the DFB scandal

2020-04-28T12:17:24.342Z


Was the 2006 World Cup bought in Germany? The allegations of bribery are now time-barred - the FR uses internal documents to trace how the DFB still intends to clarify the Franz Beckenbauer affair.


Was the 2006 World Cup bought in Germany? The allegations of bribery are now time-barred - the FR uses internal documents to trace how the DFB still intends to clarify the Franz Beckenbauer affair.

  • DFB scandal : what happened to the millions ?
  • Zwanziger , Niersbach and Schmidt could sit in a wrecked boat
  • Beckenbauer and others will probably take secret to the grave with them

Frankfurt - Coping with the past costs the German Football Association a lot to prepare for the future. The DFB has already provided the McKinsey management consultants with more than a million euros in 2017. At that time, a more efficient collaboration was developed under the heading "switching game" . Partly very successful, because the not quite cheap, newly founded National Teams and Academy Directorate with Oliver Bierhoff at the top has enjoyed great popularity in the football industry since this small revolution. Because she works strikingly communicative, creative and dynamic.

DFB scandal: Fritz Keller pushes ahead

Since Fritz Keller became President of the DFB last September , the 63-year-old has taken up a new general inventory - again with management consultants in the high house. The Freiburg native wants to know where there may still be a problem in the “new DFB” proclaimed by his predecessor Reinhard Grindel, in which - see above - a lot has already been implemented. Keller's current push, just approved by the 19-member presidium , is spectacular, but almost vanished in Corona times: the so-called summer fairy tale affair , which plunged the association into its deepest crisis, which has not yet been overcome, in the fall of 2015, and to date 30 Cost millions of euros, should be subjected to a "deep examination". Keller quite rightly finds it "highly unsatisfactory, even frustrating, that we still do not have a conclusive picture of the 2006 World Cup in question". He doesn't want to “accept it”.

Ex-treasurer and predecessor Grindel did not want that either. Freshfields , which was committed during its candidacy for a whopping five million euros, worked its way through the dried-up swamp of the faded summer fairy tale for four and a half months, and in spring 2016 presented a full 361 pages of educational reports in a Frankfurt airport hotel . There are many interesting tips that suggest that the German application for the brilliant 2006 World Cup was specifically bribed - for example with the friendly support of the Warner couple from Trinidad and Tobago with a total of 45,670.38 Deutschmarks on the shopping spree of the lady (knee highs and umbrella) in Berlin. But much, much more with the contractual assurance for the husband Jack Warner signed by the leader of the application committee , Franz Beckenbauer, shortly before the World Cup was awarded to Germany on July 6, 2000 with 12:11 votes against South Africa. The corruptible head of the North / Central America Association was promised admission tickets and other amenities worth around ten million Deutschmarks. A scandal to forget! A clear note for buying votes, which the DFB has not yet conceded - probably more from legal self-protection than from a lack of insight.

DFB scandal: what happened to the millions?

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Shortly after the corruption of an incorrectly declared transfer: The WM-OK with Horst R. Schmidt, Theo Zwanziger, Franz Beckenbauer and Wolfgang Niersbach (from left).

© dpa

What Freshfields' lawyers have not found out, however, is a completely different, much more prominent, insidious strand: the important question is what actually happened to a famous amount of the equivalent of 6.7 million euros in early summer 2002, that of an account of World Cup OC President Franz Beckenbauer was sent to Qatar in the desert. 6.7 million euros, which Beckenbauer borrowed from the (long deceased) former Adidas boss Robert Louis-Dreyfus and which Dreyfus received back three years later from the DFB via convoluted paths.

The Swiss Federal Prosecutor's Office in since this Monday stale, amateurishly prepared process against Beckenbauer , whose proceedings were never negotiated for health reasons, and the other ex- World Cup organizing committee men Theo Zwanziger, Wolfgang Niersbach and Horst R. Schmidt for fraud, or aiding and abetting In addition, among other things, alleged fraudulent deception of the former World Cup supervisory board , has brought no new knowledge. So far, the investigations by the Frankfurt public prosecutor's office against the same three men in the unused tax process before the regional court have not been carried out either .

After the statute of limitations began in front of the court in Bellinzona, the Frankfurt trial should now pick up speed again. The DFB is in a completely different role than in Switzerland. If Zwanziger, Niersbach and Schmidt had been convicted there, the DFB as the injured party would have tried to assert claims for damages as a private plaintiff. That is now a thing of the past.

DFB scandal: Zwanziger, Niersbach and Schmidt could sit in a damaged boat

If, on the other hand, the actors were convicted of tax evasion in Frankfurt , the DFB would be in a damaged boat with Zwanziger, Niersbach and Schmidt. Because then the 22.579 million euros transferred from the DFB to the tax office would never come back. The association had to pay this amount (19.2 million euros plus interest) in 2017 because its tax return for 2006 was judged to be incorrect due to the deliberately incorrectly declared repayment of those 6.7 million euros to Beckenbauer's creditor Louis-Dreyfus . The DFB, which the tax authorities refused to do nonprofit for 2006, appealed and wanted to get all the money back plus compound interest . The association still believes that it has good cards in the delicate matter.

Neither Beckenbauer nor the Qatar ex-official Mohamed bin Hammam, who had been released from all FIFA offices for life since corruption , until the vanguard of which money could be tracked by Beckenbauer's account in the summer of 2002, are ready to shed sufficient light. One thing is certain: On April 27, 2005, the German WM-OK transferred 6.7 million euros - wrongly declared as a subsidy for a supposedly 25 to 30 million euro World Cup opening gala - to FIFA, which paid the same amount to Beckenbauer the day after - Faithful Louis-Dreyfus forwarded. A mysterious cycle of millions to this day.

DFB scandal: how did the money flow? Five scenarios

There are five variants for which the money could have flowed three years earlier.

First: For corruption activities by the then FIFA President Sepp Blatter for his re-election in 2002 in the fight against the African candidate Isaa Hayatou.

Second: As a retrospective reward for the Asian FIFA executive members for their vote when voting for Germany in the summer of 2000 for the 2006 World Cup.

Third: As a reward for the corrupt part of the FIFA finance committee for the payment of a subsidy of 170 million euros to the German WM-OK.

Fourth: As a grant for a joint TV deal between Beckenbauer and Bin Hammam,

Fifth: As a hidden fee for the allegedly volunteer WM-OK President Beckenbauer .

The DFB does not know it itself, but insists that the transfer of 6.7 million euros that Louis Dreyfus borrowed in 2002 to the debtor Beckenbauer , who was soon to default, and in 2005 under the wrong usage " OK cost sharing to FIFA Football Gala " from the DFB via the Fifa was repaid to the Swiss, must be recognized as a classic case of an operating expense. Because the operation was literally kept running. Namely, that was the only way to keep the President of the Organizing Committee, Beckenbauer, as a larger than life-sized figure of light shining in German football . The lie with the alleged participation in costs at the opening gala is also evident from the fact that the DFB never asked for the money back after the planned gala was canceled in February 2006.

DFB scandal: Beckenbauer and others will probably take secret to the grave

Probably Beckenbauer (74) and Bin Hammam (70) as well as Blatter (84), who may have been initiated, will take their secret of what happened to the money to their graves. With reference to his then advisor Robert Schwan, Beckenbauer stated that he knew next to nothing about it. Swan can no longer be asked for a long time. He died five days after the last of four transfers from Raiffeisenbank Kitzbühel's joint Beckenbauer / Schwan account via a notary account in Switzerland to Doha in the Hammammam empire, where it silted up.

The DFB has little hope of making further progress on this track with new research. Nevertheless, a move is to be made to the pelvic maker, who is in poor health after two heart operations . With his later companion, henchman and string puller Fedor Radmann (75), the chances of clarification are likely to be far less.

The DFB sees slightly better opportunities, in particular the time between June 2015 (when the then DFB president Niersbach learned from Radmanns murmurs that the explosive summer fairy tale scandal theme could be taken up publicly) and Niersbach's resignation on November 9, 2015. Niersbach had to give up a good three weeks after the news magazine "Spiegel" published the first pre-report on the affair on October 16. The allegation that he had to inaugurate the DFB Presidium in the approaching tsunami in June is set in stone.

DFB scandal: poison cabinet destroyed in documents?

The recent DFB activities are a laudable request. Especially since there are still some employees in the DFB who were involved at the time - but probably only as marginal figures that were used. Namely: Niersbach's then office manager Friedrich Curtius, now the DFB general secretary, top-ranking operational force in the association, who was obviously not informed in good time by his boss in the crisis year 2015. As well as: Niersbach's assistant at the time, who on June 22, 2015 borrowed a file folder "Fifa 2000" (the public prosecutor probably speaks of the words "WM 2006" by mistake) that never later appeared and could not remember it later. She appears in the copies of the documents from the Frankfurt public prosecutor's office available to the Frankfurter Rundschau, as does an IT worker, in whose office an external hard disk "WM OK" was apparently in a hurry on October 22 during the tax raid on November 3, 2015 deleted documents was found.

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Inserted files from 2015.

© jcm

The suspicion is obvious: an entire poison cabinet of documents was destroyed in great panic here. On whose personal behalf? The secretary and the IT expert should be heard again during the current DFB research . But nobody seriously expects the folder or the deleted files to reappear.

It was an exciting day and night in autumn 2015. Secretary General Curtius, whose relationship with Niersbach has clearly deteriorated over the years, should also have another answer. The 43-year-old, who came to the DFB as a legal clerk in March 2006 and was inaugurated at the time, has already testified before Freshfields' lawyers and the Frankfurt and Swiss investigators. If there were any justified initial suspicion that Curtius might have been involved in cover-up attempts in the summer / fall of 2015 , he would not have made it into such an exposed position.

Immediately after the "Spiegel" scoop in October 2015, Curtius had advised his boss Niersbach ("My dear Wolfgang") to "tell the truth". Curtius asked in his unctuous words of October 17th, 2015, in which he promised Niersbach “one thousand percent” of his support (“Annex 6” in the Frankfurt investigation files): “If we deny the purchase of votes so vehemently where we are going the money then migrated? ”A few days later, the formerly sovereign public relations officer Niersbach tried to answer stammering questions in a legendary press conference on October 22, 2015, which he apparently could not or did not want to answer. He left the public screening badly damaged.

DFB scandal: "What if this truth comes out?"

A week earlier, exactly on the day of the page-long "Spiegel" publications in the paper, Niersbach had sounded disillusioned. Half an hour before Curtius sent his support email to Niersbach on Saturday at 11.08 am ("It is worth fighting ... with full force and with all harshness to deal with this scandal"), the DFB President sent a circular email to the operational interior Circle sent the association headquarters as well as two lawyers who read almost like hoisting the white flag: "Now the tsunami has hit the country", "Direction and trend" are "yes": It is "primarily about and against me. Although I was perhaps the smallest light in the World Cup applicant and organizing committee at the time, I am now the most interesting figure as the current president. ” 18 more points follow, again somewhat more combative, in order to tackle the "objective mistakes" of the "Spiegel" publications . And Niersbach asked the question: "What if this truth comes out? Should we force it to come out? ”He suspected his predecessor, the twenties, as a key witness behind the“ mirror ”research. Ergo, he asked his colleagues: “In the media, something could possibly be launched against the twenties behind the scenes. Any ideas?"

The strategy did not catch on, not even the support communicated by Niersbach in the mail "from people who get along with me, Federal Minister of the Interior, ex-Minister of the Interior, Hainer (then Adidas boss, now Bayern president, the editor), Rummenigge and others ". They would all have asked him to be "tough" against the "mirror".

Three and a half weeks later, Wolfgang Niersbach left the affair with his resignation as the biggest loser . Because of his misguided crisis management before and after the "Spiegel" publication , which can also be described as an attempt to cover up and which he later regretted, in contrast to the football retirees Beckenbauer , Zwanziger and Schmidt, who were no longer officially active at the time lost his offices and a significant portion of his earnings. The resignation as DFB president and the blocking of the Fifa ethics committee for the high and well-endowed FIFA and Uefa government offices have torn and isolated the formerly almost universally popular head of the association.

DFB President Fritz Keller now wants to take another look at the desperate struggle of his predecessor. But Keller also knows: "As an association, we cannot force anyone to share their knowledge with us." Hardly to assume that Niersbach should be ready for it. The 69-year-old is reportedly anything but enthusiastic that the matter is being taken up so aggressively by the DFB . The association announced a final communiqué of its recent research for an as yet undetermined date.

By Jan Christian Müller

Meanwhile, there is still no clear decision about ghost games in the Bundesliga. A Eintracht Frankfurt player does not believe in a cold start.

* fr.de is part of the nationwide Ippen-Digital editors network.

Source: merkur

All sports articles on 2020-04-28

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