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Karlsruhe (dpa) - Illegal arms deliveries to Mexican unrest provinces cost the armaments company Heckler & Koch dearly.

The Federal Court of Justice (BGH) confirmed that more than three million euros are to be collected from the company.

Two former employees have also been sentenced to probation.

However, the Karlsruhe judges see no basis for applying the stricter War Weapons Control Act.

(Ref. 3 StR 474/19)

From 2006 to 2009, the weapons manufacturer, based in Oberndorf am Neckar, sold more than 4,200 G36 assault rifles, including accessories, to Mexico for around 3.7 million euros.

Police officers should be equipped with this.

Because it was foreseeable that the German authorities would not approve deliveries to federal states in which human rights violations occurred, only uncritical provinces were untruthfully named as recipients.

In fact, the Mexican procurement agency sold the weapons to sensitive areas.

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In 2019, the Stuttgart district court sentenced a former sales manager and a former clerk to suspended sentences.

Three other defendants, including two ex-managing directors, were acquitted.

These acquittals have been final for a long time.

The two men who are said to have engineered the system were not in court: One died in 2015, the other, according to his lawyer, too sick to travel from Mexico.

The federal prosecutor's office, which appears before the BGH instead of the public prosecutor's office responsible for the indictment, would have liked to see more severe penalties.

The problem: The permits issued are not restricted to certain states.

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This only results from the so-called end-use declarations that Mexico submitted during the approval process.

Exports were therefore approved purely on paper.

And obtaining permits alone is only punishable under the Foreign Trade Act.

It is not mentioned in the War Weapons Control Act.

When the verdict was pronounced, the presiding judge Jürgen Schäfer said that it was not the task of the BGH to change anything, but of the legislature.

The district court had correctly recognized that the naming of individual states was a prerequisite for approval.

But it did not become their content.

The top criminal judges also consider it appropriate that Heckler & Koch should pay millions to the state treasury.

The legislature wanted everything that was invested in prohibited business to be irretrievably lost, said Schäfer.

It is irrelevant that, according to the regional court, the management was not involved.

Confiscation is not a punishment.

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The only open question is whether the armaments company will have to pay the full 3.7 million euros.

Because almost 700,000 euros of it come from an arms shop that is already statute-barred.

The Federal Constitutional Court recently ruled that the so-called asset recovery is then also permissible.

The decision was only published after the BGH hearing in February.

Therefore, the judges separated the decision on this aspect.

Heckler & Koch's lawyer, Hubert Gorka, indicated that the last word could not have been said on the total.

Proportionality will only be checked in the enforcement process, he said.

For the management, the violations of individual employees were "inevitable and unrecognizable".

CEO Jens Bodo Koch stated that as the supplier of security forces in NATO and the EU, Heckler & Koch “stands for the protection of democracy and the rule of law”.

"We see the recent decision of the BGH confirming our corporate policy of setting the highest standards in the selection, management and supervision of our employees at all levels in order to prevent or counteract missteps."

The peace activist Jürgen Grässlin, who initiated the proceedings with a criminal complaint, spoke of a "precedent judgment for the German arms industry".

It is now clear that illegal arms trafficking will be severely punished and will cost “real, real money”.

At the same time, the process revealed that the federal government has been looking the other way for years.

Together with his lawyer Holger Rothbauer, Grässlin called for the foreign trade and war weapons control law to be replaced by a real "arms export control law".

It must also give the victims of the arms deals the opportunity to appear as co-plaintiffs in German criminal trials.

© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210330-99-31175 / 2