The German Football Federation (DFB) has been fined €110,000 for tax evasion by a Frankfurt court in a trial relating to a payment around the 2006 World Cup, reported dpa.
Frankfurt district court judge Eva-Marie Distler spoke of a high criminal energy from the DFB but did not follow the prosecution which wanted the DFB to pay €270,000.
"In the opinion of the chamber, there is no doubt that the DFB evaded taxes," Distler said, adding that the DFB made made "a catastrophic impression" in its reappraisal of the affair.
The case centred on a payment of €6.7 million the DFB sent via the ruling body FIFA to the late French businessman Robert Louis-Dreyfus in 2005. The DFB said it was for a World Cup gala event, which never took place.
Louis-Dreyfus had earlier sent a loan of 10 million Swiss francs to World Cup organizer Franz Beckenbauer. The sum then arrived in an account of now disgraced FIFA top official Mohamed bin Hammam of Qatar – for reasons not known.
The DFB put the €6.7 million down as operating expenses in 2006 which led to the trial because the public prosecutor's office named this inadmissible and said that the DFB evaded €2.7 million in taxes.
DFB lawyer Jan Olaf Leisner saying that even though it was a concealed repayment, it could still be classified as a business expense, and thus no tax evasion took place.
Former DFB top brass Theo Zwanziger, Wolfgang Niersbach and Horst R. Schmidt were also defendants in the case along with the DFB as an entity. But they all paid sums to charity to have their cases dropped due to the complex nature of who knew what and when. The trio had consistently denied tax evasion.
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Source: www.dailyfinland.fi
