The 72-year-old has had a deep fall. He was once one of the most renowned tax lawyers. Now he has been sentenced to the highest prison sentence to date in the Cum-Ex tax scandal.
(Photo: dpa)
Bonn The Bonn Regional Court has ruled that tax attorney Hanno Berger must be imprisoned for eight years for tax evasion. Roland Zickler, presiding judge of the twelfth major criminal chamber, announced the verdict on Tuesday afternoon.
In addition, the court orders the confiscation of 13.7 million euros that were collected from the crimes. The allegations from the indictment have been almost completely confirmed, the court explained.
The court saw it as proven that Berger, as a consultant to the Hamburg banking group Warburg, was jointly responsible for a tax loss of 278 million euros. He himself is said to have enriched himself by 13.7 million euros.
The damage was caused by cum-ex deals, a method of stock trading in which participants claimed back taxes they had not paid.
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With the verdict against Berger, another milestone in the criminal investigation of Cum-Ex has been reached. More than a decade ago, the 72-year-old lawyer was one of the key figures behind the deals that caused total damage in the tens of billions.
Berger’s sentence is also the highest so far that has been pronounced against one of those involved in the scandal. The Bonn Regional Court also imposed the highest sentence to date when it sentenced a banker from the Warburg Group to five and a half years in prison in 2021. It was about the same complex as in Berger’s case.
Berger himself had eluded a procedure for a long time. In 2012 he fled from the public prosecutor’s office to Switzerland. The authorities there did not arrest him until mid-2021, and then delivered Berger to Germany at the end of February 2022. The process has been going on since April.
More: Hanno Berger – His Rise and Fall