EIt is one minute past ten when Peter Feldmann enters the room. After all, the accused showed up for the verdict. What he hears in the next hour and a quarter is a reprimand that the former mayor was probably rarely forced to hear – and makes him, who loves to talk to the press, finally want to say nothing more. Feldmann had been before the district court since October on charges of accepting benefits. On Friday, the trial will end with the voted-out mayor being sentenced to 120 daily rates of 175 euros each, i.e. a fine of 21,000 euros.
The court sees the evidence confirmed what the public prosecutor’s office determined and brought to prosecution: that Feldmann’s future wife only got her job as head of the German-Turkish daycare center in Ostend because Hannelore Richter wanted to secure the goodwill of the mayor. That Feldmann also recognized this, because he knew that Richter did not shy away from any risks in this regard and that she had already concluded a return agreement with him in 2012, just in case, when he became mayor. And that despite the fact that she neither liked him nor considered him competent. Feldmann, who was enabled by the Richter couple to switch to Arbeiterwohlfahrt (AWO) in 2008, had not performed satisfactorily in any of two positions at the AWO.