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Andrea Tandler at the meeting of the Mask Committee of Inquiry in the Bavarian State Parliament

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Peter Kneffel / dpa

In the wake of the mask affair in Bavaria, the public prosecutor's office has brought charges against Andrea Tandler, the daughter of former CSU general secretary Gerold Tandler. The indictment will be brought on suspicion of tax evasion, said a spokeswoman for the public prosecutor's office in Munich I on Friday. Previously, »Süddeutsche Zeitung« and Bayerischer Rundfunk had reported.

Details will be announced by the authority early next week, it said. Also accused are Tandler's business partner Darius N. and a third defendant S. Tandler's lawyers did not initially respond to requests for comment.

In pre-trial detention since January

Tandler and her business partner Darius N. were arrested in January on the basis of arrest warrants issued by the Munich District Court and have been in custody ever since. After the Regional Court of Munich I, the Higher Regional Court of Munich (OLG) had also rejected the detention complaints of the two defendants as unfounded in April.

Tandler and her partner Darius N. are regarded as the epitome of the crisis profiteers who, at the beginning of the pandemic, wanted to earn money on a large scale from the plight of the state, with sometimes indecently high prices for protective material. For example, Tandler had sold masks of dubious quality to the state of Bavaria for 8.90 euros a piece – the highest price Bavaria paid for masks during the pandemic. However, Tandler bagged the biggest deals with the Federal Ministry of Health under CDU man Jens Spahn. His company initially ordered masks from the company Emix for almost one billion euros.

With the sale of the masks to the Federal Ministry of Health and the states of Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia, Tandler and her partner are said to have collected 48.3 million euros in commission. But then the taxation is said to have been tricked. The public prosecutor's office apparently assumes that the duo could have evaded 10 to 15 million euros in trade tax and gift tax. Her lawyers always firmly rejected this. A spokesman for Tandler had even said after the allegations became known that the lawyers expected that after the discontinuation of a first trial, "all other allegations will prove to be unfounded".

If there were a conviction now, a prison sentence would be expected for tax evasion of this amount.

evh/dpa