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DFB President Fritz Keller: Criminal charges lead to public prosecutor investigations
Photo: Eibner-Pressefoto / imago images / Eibner
The Frankfurt public prosecutor has initiated criminal investigations against DFB President Fritz Keller and his former office manager Samy Hamama (Az: 7460 Js 215243/21).
The trigger was a criminal complaint from media advisor Kurt Diekmann, who was under contract with the DFB until autumn last year.
This puts Keller on the defensive in the power struggle with his general secretary Friedrich Curtius, which has been going on for months, because the investigators affirm an initial suspicion in terms of the Diekmann complaint by initiating the procedure.
The media advisor had accused the DFB President and his office manager of betraying trade secrets in his criminal complaint at the end of March.
According to Diekmann's lawyer, Keller had »caused his office manager, Samy Hamama, to obtain an invoice from Diekmann Kommunikation GmbH from controlling in an obviously illegal manner«.
The bill was then shown in a ZDF report.
The problem for Keller and Hamama is the fact that the issue to be determined is as good as cleared up internally by the DFB. According to an investigation by the compliance department of the DFB, the invoice had been obtained by Keller's office manager from the accounting department. Because Hamama had no access rights for this and, according to DFB compliance, is suspected of being the "primary source of ZDF", he was dismissed without notice.
Hamama denies having passed the bill.
Keller himself had subsequently outed himself in an e-mail to association officials as the client for his employee: His office manager had acted on his "express instructions for the purpose of" providing "complete information about internal processes".
Internally, the DFB President had claimed that Diekmann was responsible for the fact that he was badly portrayed in the media.
amp / gla