Prosecutors want long prison sentences for Maple bankers

Cologne The investigators estimate the damage that the Canadian Maple Bank is said to have caused at 389 million euros. The German tax authorities are said to have suffered more damage. Four former managers of the bank must therefore answer before the district court in Frankfurt. Now the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor’s Office has held its plea – and in some cases demanded long prison sentences. In addition, the criminal prosecutors want to collect a total of almost 20 million euros from the accused, who are accused of particularly serious tax evasion.

The process of so-called cum-ex share deals from the now insolvent Maple Bank has been underway since May 2021. The principle of the transactions: The participants traded shares with (cum) and without (ex) dividend entitlement in a group in order to have a capital gains tax that was only paid once reimbursed several times. The Maple case is considered particularly serious because the bank operated the district business within the group. Maple, on the other hand, is not an isolated case. Numerous institutes are involved. All in all, experts estimate the damage in what is probably the biggest tax scandal in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany to be in the double-digit billions.

Wolfgang Schuck, the main defendant and former Germany boss of Maple, should be jailed for five years and three months and pay 5.5 million euros, according to prosecutors. According to the prosecutors, Schuck received the money as a bonus for the cum-ex deals. The investigators demanded an even higher penalty for the managing director, who was responsible for the trade at the time. He should be jailed for five years and nine months and pay two million euros. A third defendant is said to have been imprisoned for three years and nine months and paid 1.5 million euros.

Enlightener can hope for clemency

According to the public prosecutor’s office, the only one who could get away with a suspended sentence was the fourth in the group, the former head of the commercial department – although he earned the most from the business. The prosecutors are thus honoring his role as an investigator. They gave him a two-year suspended prison sentence. That hardly helps him financially: the sum of the proceeds of the crime to be confiscated is by far the highest in the quartet. The banker is to pay 10.9 million euros.

The highest courts have now ruled that the transactions were illegal and punishable by law, and four bankers have already been convicted in other cases before the Bonn Regional Court. The first two judgments are already final. The former chief representative of MM Warburg has to go to prison for five and a half years.

In the case of Maple Bank, the investigators in Frankfurt came across a particularly brazen system. Unlike other institutes, the bank with Canadian roots did not even bother to involve other financial institutions in the district transactions. The public prosecutors speak of group-internal circle transactions, which they operated mainly in the years 2005 to 2007.

In the end, however, the bank collapsed on its business. In 2015, almost 300 investigators searched the Frankfurt business premises and other objects. At the beginning of 2016, the financial supervisory authority closed Maple Germany. A little later, the bank collapsed under the tax authorities’ demands for reimbursement and had to file for bankruptcy.

Now at least the end of the first criminal trial in the Maple case is in sight. The presiding judge Werner Gröschel had already expressed himself very clearly months ago: “The chamber assumes that there is a high probability of conviction for all four defendants,” said Gröschel in February.

However, the criminal investigation of the Maple case does not end there. The next criminal trial is already imminent: Two former tax attorneys from the law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer also have to go to the dock. Among them is the firm’s former global head of tax affairs, Ulf Johannemann. He was probably the most important advisor to Maple Bank for the cum-ex deals.

More: Warburg Bank and BNY Mellon pay back 60 million euros to the Treasury.