Friday, May 21, 2021
Broken summer fairy tale trial
Justice compensates ex-DFB sizes for farce
Prominent former DFB greats are brought to court in Switzerland because of disagreements surrounding the 2006 World Cup, but the process crashes. Now the functionaries are being compensated, but receive significantly less than hoped.
After the failure of the summer fairy tale process in Switzerland, former top officials of the German Football Association and FIFA receive compensation. The four originally accused will receive a total of around 705,000 Swiss francs (640,000 euros), the Swiss Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona announced. The sum was far below the demands.
The federal prosecutor had tried to impose litigation costs on the ex-officials. She argued, among other things, that the four made the process more difficult before it was dropped in April 2020 due to statute of limitations. The accused were the former DFB presidents Wolfgang Niersbach and Theo Zwanziger, the former DFB general secretary Horst R. Schmidt and the former FIFA general secretary Urs Linsi.
The compensation from the Swiss treasury was awarded mainly for legal fees. In addition, the four will each receive CHF 15,000 “for particularly serious violations of personal circumstances in connection with media coverage,” as the court announced. They were not to blame for the course of the process. The four had demanded a total of 3.2 million francs in compensation and 100,000 francs in damages each.
Zwanziger, Schmidt and Linsi were charged with fraud, Niersbach with aiding and abetting fraud. A case against World Cup organizer Franz Beckenbauer had been separated and discontinued because of his state of health. In essence, it was about a payment of 6.7 million euros by the DFB through the world association FIFA to the entrepreneur Robert Louis-Dreyfus, who has since died. The money was declared as a contribution to a gala for the 2006 World Cup, which never took place.
The DFB is still working on the summer fairy tale affair internally. In addition, the Frankfurt public prosecutor is investigating the same factual context against the quartet. FIFA announced in February that it would no longer pursue the ethics proceedings against Zwanziger, Beckenbauer and Schmidt due to the statute of limitations.
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