According to the suspicion of the public prosecutor’s office, the former official is said to have concluded a service contract with a communications agency on behalf of the association.
(Photo: dpa)
Dusseldorf In the meantime, visits from public prosecutors have become accustomed to at the Frankfurt DFB headquarters on the Otto-Fleck-Schneise. There have been repeated searches in recent years. This Thursday, 70 investigators were on the road – in Hesse, but also in other parts of the republic.
In the latest case, the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office is investigating suspected infidelity against a former representative of the German Football Association. The authority announced this and confirmed house searches in the DFB headquarters, the private apartment of the former official and in the business premises of five companies on Thursday. ZDF had reported first.
According to information from the Handelsblatt, the accused is the former DFB General Secretary Friedrich Curtius. According to the suspicion of the public prosecutor’s office, the former official is said to have concluded a service contract with a communications agency on behalf of the association.
On this basis, the DFB paid a total of 360,000 euros to the company. “The contract is said to have been a mere sham contract,” said a spokesman for the public prosecutor’s office.
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Because of the suspicion of aiding and abetting infidelity, a person responsible for the communications agency is also being investigated. Hanns Feigen, Curtius’ defense attorney, declined to comment. The communications consultant did not respond to a request. The search warrant of the Frankfurt District Court dates back to December 22, 2021. Apparently, the current search came as a surprise.
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However, the topic is not new. The business relationship between the DFB and the communications agency has been the subject of discussions for some time. Even the association’s internal audit committee and an external commercial detective agency had investigated the contract in question.
The examiners came to the conclusion that it was not clear for which services the DFB paid 360,000 euros to the PR agency. With reference to the many shortcomings, they even brought a self-disclosure into play.
The public prosecutor’s office searched the association’s offices on Thursday.
(Photo: dpa)
The public prosecutor’s office has now launched its own investigation into the matter. This means that the DFB is once again the focus of official investigations before its Bundestag in Bonn next Friday with the election of the new president.
DFB does not come to rest
In November 2021, the public prosecutor’s office took documents from the headquarters of sponsor Adidas because of the allegation of tax evasion. According to media reports, it was about the taxation of benefits in kind from the long-standing DFB sponsor between 2015 and 2020.
In another case in October 2020, the business premises of the DFB and the private apartments of several officials were searched by tax investigators. It was about the taxation of income from perimeter advertising at home games of the national team in 2014 and 2015. The DFB had escaped taxation of around 4.7 million euros, the investigators had announced at the time.
At the end of October this year, the public prosecutor’s office dropped the tax proceedings against the DFB interim boss Rainer Koch. The President of the Bavarian Football Association is also a member of the Uefa executive. Before that, the proceedings against the former DFB top officials Reinhard Rauball and Helmut Sandrock had already been discontinued.
The public prosecutor’s office had recently dropped the proceedings against Friedrich Curtius in this matter. Now the former DFB general secretary has to deal with a new criminal case.
With agency material.
More: The public prosecutor is investigating against the DFB because of Adidas donations.