Scandal surrounding the 2006 World Cup: Former DFB President Zwanziger files a criminal complaint

Dhe criminal complaint by the former President of the German Football Association, Theo Zwanziger, against several officials in the Hessian judiciary and the Hessian tax investigation department was forwarded to the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor’s Office this Monday. This was confirmed by the spokeswoman for the Hessian Minister of Justice Roman Poseck (CDU) when asked by the FAZ.

Zwanziger suspects tax investigators, four public prosecutors from the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office specializing in economic matters, other public prosecutors and senior public prosecutors from the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office and the general public prosecutor’s office, and three judges from the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court of perverting the law, prosecuting innocent people and breach of trust. The background to this is the decision by the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court on August 16, 2019 to open main proceedings against Zwanziger, former DFB Secretary General Horst R. Schmidt, former DFB President Wolfgang Niersbach and former Secretary General of the International Football Association FIFA, Urs Linsi .

According to Zwanziger: indications of breaches of duty

The regional court had previously rejected the opening of proceedings in October 2018, and the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office had lodged an appeal. She accuses the German officials of tax evasion in the “summer fairy tale” scandal surrounding the 2006 World Cup, and the Swiss Linsi of aiding and abetting. A procedure conducted by the Swiss judicial authorities was discontinued in 2020 due to the statute of limitations, but the Frankfurt Regional Court has not yet decided how the Hessian procedure should continue.

In an interview with the FAZ, Zwanziger spoke of a “bloating in Frankfurt” with a view to the Hessian judiciary. “Three years is a long time, we should have been acquitted long ago, because there is nothing to the allegations,” Zwanziger had said and at the same time “doubted” that tax investigators and the public prosecutor’s office were following the law.

In the complaint, which was sent to the Hessian Minister of Justice almost three weeks ago, Zwanziger’s lawyer writes that there are sufficient indications that officials from the tax investigation and the judicial authorities have knowingly and intentionally committed serious breaches of duty, from the beginning of the preliminary investigation to the decision of the higher regional court more than three years ago to open the main proceedings.

Even with the allegation of a tax reduction, which the prosecution is based on, which, according to investigators, is said to have taken place in 2006, the investigators had pursued and accused a “no longer prosecutable simple tax evasion as a “particularly serious case” and thus consciously and roughly knew everyone Legislation bent the law and at the same time caused considerable financial damage to the state of Hesse”.

In fact, 6.7 million euros were transferred from the DFB to FIFA in 2005 – the transfer is a linchpin of the allegations of corruption surrounding the successful German World Cup bid for 2006. However, the accusation would have been statute-barred for an act in 2005 , before, according to a report by the “Spiegel” from October 2015, but no later than 2017. The “business transaction” was “transported illegally into the year 2006” by tax investigators and the public prosecutor’s office, in which the tax consultant made a “fictitious posting with no effect on income”. the DFB is turned off without actual payment, according to the 15-page advertisement.

In it, the 77-year-old man in his twenties, who was President of the DFB from 2006 to 2012, urges “independent investigators at a physical and mental distance from Frankfurt” to conduct the “in our view mandatory investigations”. Before his appointment as Minister of Justice, the Hessian Minister of Justice Poseck was President of the Higher Regional Court in Frankfurt for ten years in the cabinet of Prime Minister Boris Rhein.