Hanno Berger's gaze extends beyond the large kitchen table, on which there are several files and folders.
It's the first days of the new year 2020, the tax lawyer has invited several journalists from the FAZ for an interview in the Swiss canton of Graubünden, where he has lived since November 2012.
Berger cannot cross the border to Germany.
Due to an arrest warrant from the Hessian judiciary, he must expect his immediate arrest.
In the tax scandal surrounding the cum-ex transactions, criminal proceedings are to begin against him in the near future, and further charges by the Cologne public prosecutor are in preparation.
Berger looks out the large window of his bright eat-in kitchen.
He had the house in the mountain village of Zuoz in the Upper Engadine built for himself and his family just a few years ago.
Directly across the street is the Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz, a well-known boarding school where Ferdinand Piëch was a student in the 1950s.
Now Berger's grandson goes to this school.
Berger and his criminal defense lawyer spent the whole morning explaining their view of the cum-ex transactions to the visitors, reporting on references to the income tax law and interpreting the decisions of the German financial courts.
And when the question of his criminal liability arises, Berger, marked by a severe cold, replies in a hoarse voice: "I will face the proceedings in Germany."
Marcus Young
Editor in Business.
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More than two years later, the time has come.
As of Monday, the now 71-year-old has to answer before a white collar crime chamber at the Bonn Regional Court for serious tax evasion.
There, the Cologne public prosecutor accuses him, together with his former law firm partner S. and investment bankers, of having significantly supported the cum-ex transactions of the Hamburg private bank MM Warburg in the years 2007 to 2011 by setting up the structures.
As a result, the tax authorities reimbursed a capital gains tax that had only been incurred once.
The damage to the tax authorities is said to have amounted to 278 million euros.
Berger's "criminal masterpiece"
Originally, share group transactions around the dividend record date were only practiced in interbank trading.
But Berger, once a high-ranking bank auditor in the Hessian financial administration and later an influential partner in international law firms such as Shearman & Sterling and Dewey & LeBoeuf, found ways to open these structures to private investors from 2006 onwards.
The Dewey lawyers set up fund vehicles that enabled wealthy entrepreneurs such as Rafael Roth or drugstore founder Erwin Müller to finance cum-ex deals.
Because: For the commercial transactions, considerable debt capital had to be raised from banks, foreign short sellers made the shares of the Dax companies available.