The Wiesbaden trial of cum-ex stock transactions against key figure Hanno Berger continued on Friday.
On the second day, the Wiesbaden district court did not decide on an application by the public defender to suspend the hearing and only continue it after the Hessian summer holidays in September.
The public defenders Sebastian Kaiser and Michael Simon, who were only appointed in March, argued that they needed more time to familiarize themselves sufficiently with the complex case.
The fact that Berger is also on trial in Bonn for cum-ex stock deals makes meetings with him more difficult.
In addition, Berger had survived a corona infection, which is why time had passed.
The Wiesbaden trial against Berger on suspicion of tax evasion (AZ: 6 KLs - 1111 Js 18753/21) had been delayed several times and was last postponed from April to June.
The 71-year-old tax attorney, who was extradited from Switzerland to Germany in February, had rejected the allegations.
The Bonn Regional Court, where Berger has to answer for particularly serious tax evasion, and the Wiesbaden Regional Court had not been able to agree on merging the processes.
Another stumbling block was that Berger's lawyers dropped out, so that public defenders were appointed at short notice.
The former tax official Berger is considered the architect of the cum-ex deals in Germany, in which investors never had paid capital gains tax refunded and thus cheated the state by an estimated double-digit billion amount.
For a long time it was unclear whether such deals are punishable.
The Federal Court of Justice ruled in 2021 that cum-ex transactions are to be classified as tax evasion.