WBecause of his numerous involvements as a consultant in the stock group transactions around the dividend record date (“cum-ex”), the 72-year-old defendant may have to expect a long prison sentence. After the evidence had been taken, the Cologne public prosecutor’s office applied for nine years’ imprisonment for Berger last week. It assumes three cases of particularly serious tax evasion, which is said to have caused tax damage of 276 million euros. Berger initiated transactions and “taught” them to other participants, emphasized public prosecutor Jan Schletz in his closing argument.
He assumed Berger had a high level of criminal energy. As a former Hessian tax officer, he knew and exploited the weaknesses of the authorities. The prosecutor described a partial confession that Berger made in August as tactical in the process – but the criminal chamber will have to take it into account in its verdict.
Fourth sentence in Bonn
It is the fourth verdict that the criminal court, chaired by Roland Zickler, will announce. In March 2021, the judges from Bonn made the first judgment in a cum-ex criminal case against two British stock exchange traders. All decisions have now been confirmed by the Federal Court of Justice. There is a high probability that Berger will appeal there if he is convicted.
In addition, the accused must expect another court decision from the Wiesbaden District Court in the near future. There, too, Berger has to answer for advising on cum-ex transactions, here there are still negotiation dates up to 2023.
The expected confiscation order by the Economic Criminal Court in Bonn is also explosive. Last week, the public prosecutor’s office in Cologne applied for the state to confiscate around 27.3 million euros from Berger’s assets in the event of a conviction. The tax attorney and his then law firm partner S. are said to have received this money via fictitious invoices in connection with the Warburg Bank’s cum-ex transactions. At least his former colleague, who has been the prosecutor’s key witness in the criminal trials in Bonn and Wiesbaden for years, wants to come clean.
Paying the key witness
As became known immediately before the opinion in the criminal proceedings against Berger, S. is said to have paid back an amount of 13.6 million euros to the tax authorities, according to his lawyers. However, the confirmation of receipt of payment from the Federal Central Tax Office was not yet available. It is expected that Zickler and his assessors will comment on this point before the verdict is announced. Then the court would have to give Hanno Berger, as the accused, the last word again.
According to the key witness, Hanno Berger is said to have earned at least 50 million euros within a few years by advising on cum-ex deals and placing investors with banks. Berger himself stated in court that he was penniless. His houses in Hesse and in the Swiss canton of Graubünden now belong to his wife. She is also the managing director of a wood yard that Berger runs at his former place of residence in the Main-Kinzig district. In addition, there may be up to 300 gold bars, the whereabouts of which have not yet been clarified: A few weeks ago, the criminal court read excerpts from a Luxembourg company called Stonewall Securities, which has since been liquidated. According to the investigators, Berger and his law firm partner S. were behind this company. The documents read in Bonn show that the gold was brought to Switzerland in 2013. After that, the trail is lost – as reported by WDR, among others, there should be further business connections in the direction of Dubai.
suspicion of money laundering
Meanwhile, the public prosecutor’s office has initiated investigations into suspected money laundering against several people close to Berger. Just a few days ago, police officers and public prosecutors searched residential and business premises in Hesse and Switzerland. Berger fled there in autumn 2012 after a raid by the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor’s Office on his office and property. After the charges in Wiesbaden and Bonn, the tax attorney initially sent signals that he wanted to face criminal proceedings in Germany.
However, Berger was absent from the first trial at the Wiesbaden Regional Court in spring 2020 and gave health reasons for his absence. Both Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia applied for his extradition, but the suspect went all the way to the highest courts in Switzerland. It was only when the Confederates classified his actions as investment fraud and thus as a criminal offense that things got moving. In February of this year, Berger was handed over to the German authorities in Konstanz. Since then, the now 72-year-old tax attorney has been in custody alternately in prisons in Cologne and Frankfurt.