A private customer advisor at Sparkasse Werra-Meißner cheated wealthy, elderly customers for years. Strong internal pressure drove him into a gambling addiction, he said in court.
(Photo: dpa)
Dusseldorf After only six days of negotiations, the verdict was issued in the case of a former private customer advisor who had defrauded his customers by almost 438,000 euros over a period of five years. The ex-employee was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison.
The scandal has been heard in court since November – 29 cases of fraud were charged. According to an expert opinion, a gambling addiction as well as narcissistic personality disorder of the defendant was only allowed to mitigate part of the period of the offense. The public prosecutor’s office had demanded four years in prison, the defense pleaded for a suspended sentence.
“I believed everything”, the high net worth customer of the Sparkasse Werra-Meißner recently assured before the third large criminal chamber of the Kassel regional court. Receipts, which the trusted customer advisor presented to her with the winning smile, were signed by the elderly lady without looking closely.
So she acknowledged the receipt of gold bars without actually having received them. In the end, she alone suffered damage of almost 200,000 euros. Other, mostly elderly customers of the Hessian regional savings bank fared similarly to the 91-year-old senior citizen.
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Home visits, home-made yoghurt as a souvenir, stories about their own children – this created proximity to the extremely wealthy customers, with whom, according to the indictment, the defendant “had built a relationship of trust over the course of his many years of activity”.
During the trial, the former banker made a comprehensive confession. He described how, on the one hand, he had some success in the Sparkasse at the age of early twenties and was considered talented. He looked after a volume of 100 million euros.
Escape into sports betting
On the other hand, after a change in the top management, he was worried about the considerably increased pressure to sell and the fear of humiliation in the event of failure. This pressure would then have driven him into a gambling addiction, which he pursued primarily in sports betting.
At some point “everything revolved around gambling from morning to evening,” the ex-banker described it in an eight-page statement that he presented to the court. He had gambled away private insurance, home loan and savings contracts and even his children’s savings accounts. In order to be able to continue gambling, he then sold the gold intended for customers, for example.
The whole thing was only exposed at the beginning of 2019 after the internal audit department had previously encountered inconsistencies in the account management and discovered a connection between losses at the sports betting provider Tipico and losses on the accounts managed by the employee.
In response to previous inquiries about this, the Sparkasse stated that the employee initially only enriched himself sporadically, “so that his activities slipped through the network of our control systems”. It was only in 2018 that he increased activities significantly. However, the former account manager had already enriched himself around 20 times between 2014 and 2017, as the process now showed. In 2018 he accessed nine times.
According to the Sparkasse Werra-Meißner, customers have long been fully compensated. The bank reached a settlement with the former employee before the labor court in Kassel. He has to pay damages in the amount of 650,000 euros. In addition, at least one customer has also sued the former banker in civil law. Meanwhile, the ex-banker faces a second charge of possible breach of trust.
The public prosecutor’s office in Kassel determines whether the consultant also made high-risk investments for a customer “in breach of agreement and duty”. It was about futures transactions worth several hundred thousand euros. According to the public prosecutor’s office, there is now “a business expert report that now requires inspection and evaluation”.
Another Sparkasse employee under suspicion of theft
In the near future, a second former employee of the Sparkasse Werra-Meißner could also have to answer in court, who may have been on a criminal path. The public prosecutor’s office in Kassel accuses a 53-year-old of theft and damage to property and has brought charges. At the end of May 2019, the accused was said to have gained access to the dispensing compartment of an ATM in a branch in Witzenhausen using access data and stole cash worth over 148,000 euros there.
He is said to have “sprayed the dummy camera built into the ATM with paint and stole the control unit of the ATM”. The case from May 2019 also had a spectacular moment: Because boreholes had also been found in the ATM at the time, police explosives specialists approached and blocked the parking lot of a nearby hardware store. A decision has yet to be made as to whether the prosecution will be admitted.
More: Shadows on the healthy Sparkasse world