The Hamburg publisher heir and former stock market star Alexander Falk is likely to be in prison for the second time.

The Federal Court of Justice (BGH) on Wednesday rejected the appeal of the 53-year-old against his conviction to four and a half years in prison.

This means that a judgment by the Frankfurt Regional Court from July 2020 is final, according to which Falk had commissioned criminals to shoot a business lawyer.

Katja Gelinsky

Business correspondent in Berlin

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This is what the case is about: When the Frankfurt lawyer Wolfgang J. wanted to get into his car in front of his house in Frankfurt in February 2010, an unknown person shot him in the thigh at close range.

There had been anonymous calls before, once the front door had been smashed in with a hammer.

The Frankfurt district court was convinced that Falk had commissioned the attack.

The second criminal division of the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) should now decide whether the conviction of the businessman for inciting dangerous bodily harm from 2020 is valid.

The court had imposed a prison sentence of four years and six months.

The BGH confirmed the verdict against Falk.

Falk had already been in custody for 22 months.

Like a TV crime show

Had the case been made into a TV crime drama, reviewers would have sniffed: too far-fetched, too bold, too confusing.

The trailer would show how the descendant of the Hanseatic nobility travels as a knight of fortune in the new economy.

He overplays his hand and has to go behind bars as a fraud and balance sheet falsifier.

There he made contact with members of organized crime, wanting to harness them to defend himself against claims for damages in the hundreds of millions from his former business partners.

Then the nightly attack on the lawyer.

A new criminal case follows.

This time for inciting a violent crime.

A dubious key witness appears, also manipulating tapes in connection with an alleged attempt at blackmail.

Finally, he was again sentenced to imprisonment.

In the trial at the Frankfurt Regional Court, the presiding judge had previously brought out heavy artillery against Falk and his team of lawyers, who had attacked the court with an aggressive defense strategy that was at times staged as a spectacle.

Judge Jörn Immerschmitt described the attack on the shot lawyer as an "attack on the rule of law".

You can see what a bad person Alexander Falk is: "The act expresses your attitude." The chairman accused the defense lawyers of arrogance, disrespect, insults and even a "subjectively perceived threat" to the court.

"The limits were sometimes clearly exceeded."

This confirmed Falk and his lawyers' conviction that the criminal proceedings had been conducted unfairly and improperly.

You really wanted to condemn Falk.

The Frankfurt court clung to "lying witnesses and manipulated audio recordings instead of hearing the witnesses they described as central and taking into account the sometimes significantly exculpatory facts," Falk's defense attorney Björn Gercke complained after the verdict was pronounced.