Dusseldorf At the beginning of her career she dealt with drug addicts and petty criminals, but from 2013 prosecutor Anne Brorhilker entered the world of investment bankers and the super-rich. A lawyer for the billionaire Erwin Müller had sent an incendiary letter. The drugstore king got into dubious tax transactions without his knowledge and lost millions. Brorhilker took the letter as the first piece of the puzzle. The puzzle was called Cum-Ex.
Year after year, a gang of investors, banks, consultants and lawyers enriched themselves at the German tax fund. Brorhilker could not put it that way at the time – she was only at the very beginning of the research.
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Another person might not have investigated either. Too much work, too powerful the opponent. Deutsche Bank, Swiss money houses with a hundred-year history, American financial giants. When they saw the mountains of files in Brorhilker’s office, some colleagues just shook their heads.
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Today Brorhilker is a kind of superheroine of the investigative scene. Dozens of civil servants are assigned to her, and she puts the most powerful financial institutions in the world on the defensive from her simple office in a derelict building in Cologne-Sülz.
Brorhilker put the Cum-Ex puzzle together, cracked the tax evasion scheme. Three processes have already ended with guilty verdicts, the Federal Court of Justice has fully confirmed their assessment: Cum-Ex is criminal. Now Brorhilker has the upper hand. The more than 1000 suspects in their files will not rest.
In a conversation with the Handelsblatt investigative reporters Sönke Iwersen and Volker Votsmeier, Ina Karabasz tells the story of the prosecutor who did not give up. Now at Handelsblatt Crime.
More: You can hear the previous episode of Handelsblatt Crime here.
Handelsblatt Crime appears every 14 days and can be heard wherever there are podcasts.