Immoral behavior is difficult to punish. When a few years ago the owners of several apartment buildings, especially in Frankfurt's Nordend and Westend, wanted to get rid of their tenants "the hard way" in order to modernize the houses and increase income, there was great outrage. Tenants protested against unreasonable living conditions and the unletting of real estate. They marched, accompanied by the mayor of the Westend and television cameras, into the practice of a general practitioner who was considered to be one of those responsible. In the end, however, he and four business partners were not convicted of coercion, but of tax evasion. The public prosecutor's office had found out about the group.In autumn 2016, the business partners were arrested and two years later sentenced to prison terms of between two years and three months and almost five years for tax evasion of around ten million euros before the regional court.

Rainer Schulze

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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But the Federal Court of Justice partially overturned the judgment due to legal errors in July 2020.

He accepted the regional court's guilty verdict on withheld wages and evaded building withholding taxes.

However, because the damage caused by the evasion of sales tax was incorrectly calculated, the procedure has to be renegotiated on this point.

This has an impact on the sentence.

Drug trafficking and money laundering

This happened against three of the five defendants in the first half of the year. The sentence has been reduced: the doctor who was responsible for financing and obtaining the bank loans and another defendant now got away with a suspended sentence, the sentences against them are final. A third defendant received three years' imprisonment and went on appeal. On Tuesday, the other two former business partners stood before the regional court. One of them is the supposed head of the group: The 44-year-old Said M. was responsible for the construction companies and in the first trial for tax evasion was sentenced to four years and nine months in prison in around one hundred cases.

The second defendant, Sawas V., provided the group with additional liquidity through betting shops; he received the lowest sentence at two years and three months.

You still have to defend yourself against further allegations before the regional court: Both are charged with being involved in the illicit trade in narcotics.

They are said to have hired drug couriers to bring two kilograms of cocaine from the Netherlands across the border.

In addition, the public prosecutor's office accuses them of money laundering, because they are said to have built up their real estate assets with income from drug trafficking.

V. also has to answer for the evasion of income taxes.

Three stages to tax evasion

During the reading of the indictment, the public prosecutor described the defendants as members of a gang that had been formed for the purpose of tax evasion and a three-tier company network. In order to renovate the real estate - at its peak the group owned up to a hundred houses - as inexpensively as possible, construction companies were founded, the majority of which were employed in black. On a third level, bogus companies had been founded, which then apparently fictitiously accounted for the construction work and were run by straw men. Services subject to sales tax have not been registered with the tax authorities. The tax reduction system worked because each of the defendants had taken on the role assigned to them, said the prosecutor.

The regional court has set 27 trial days. But both defendants have a keen interest in bringing the proceedings to an earlier conclusion, assured the respective defense attorney. After all, the tax debts have already been paid - through the sale of the real estate.