Andrea Tandler is said to have evaded 23.5 million euros in taxes

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Defendant Andrea Tandler: 40 volumes of investigation files

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Peter Kneffel / dpa

A week after the indictment of Andrea Tandler, the public prosecutor's office in Munich I has given details of the tax allegations against the daughter of ex-CSU General Secretary Gerold Tandler. Specifically, she is accused of tax evasion in three cases in the amount of 23.5 million euros, as the public prosecutor's office announced on Tuesday in Munich.

This involves unpaid income tax of 8.7 million euros, jointly evaded gift tax of 6.6 million euros and trade tax evasion of 8.2 million euros.

Tandler is also accused of subsidy fraud because she concealed 26.5 million euros in commission from mask deals and applied for Corona emergency aid of 9000 euros for her advertising agency, it said.

The starting point of the case were commission payments that Tandler, her business partner and partner N. and a third defendant are said to have received at the beginning of the corona pandemic. The entrepreneur had brokered contracts for personal protective equipment, in particular masks, between EMIX Trading GmbH and various federal and state authorities.

Tandler and her partner are regarded as the epitome of the crisis profiteers who, at the beginning of the pandemic, wanted to profit 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 Emix for just under 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.

Tandler and N. had already been arrested in January on the basis of arrest warrants issued by the Munich District Court and have been in custody ever since.

Long prison sentences are imminent

A department specializing in criminal tax law had carried out the very extensive and elaborate investigations together with the Munich tax investigation – there were around 40 volumes of investigation files, it said. Now the 6th Commercial Criminal Chamber of the Regional Court of Munich I must decide on the opening of the main proceedings. If convicted, Tandler and two other defendants face long prison sentences.

The commissions of 26.5 million euros were obtained between March 3, 2020 and March 31, 2020, the prosecutor's office said. It went on to say that Tandler had not declared the commissions in her own income tax, but via a pre-founding GbR (civil law partnership), which, according to the public prosecutor's office, was founded on April 1, 2020 at the earliest. There, the payments were taxed at a significantly lower tax rate. Since, in addition to Tandler, N. also had an equal share in the GbR, the public prosecutor's office considered the contribution of the commission claims of around 26.5 million euros to be a gift not reported to the tax office.

With regard to trade tax, Tandler and N. also stated that it was to be paid in the Munich suburb of Grünwald and not in the state capital. However, the decisions in day-to-day business were made in Munich, according to the prosecution. "The aim of the false information was to avoid the increased trade tax assessment amount of 490% of the state capital of Munich compared to the 240% of the municipality of Grünwald," the public prosecutor's office said.

After the Munich I Regional Court, the Munich Higher Regional Court (OLG) had also rejected the detention complaints of the two accused as unfounded. A spokesman for Tandler had said after the allegations became known that the lawyers expected that after the discontinuation of a first case, "all other allegations would prove to be unfounded". Tandler and her co-partner "rejected all public allegations."

sol/dpa