German FA fined by court in 2006 World Cup payment affair
Flags with the logo of the German Football Federation (DFB) fly outside the RheinEnergie stadium. Fabian Strauch/dpa
The German Football Federation (DFB) was fined €110,000 ($128,000) for tax evasion by a Frankfurt court on Wednesday, in a trial relating to a payment around the 2006 World Cup.
Frankfurt district court judge Eva-Marie Distler spoke of a high criminal energy from the DFB but did not follow the prosecution which wanted the DFB to pay €270,000.
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"In the opinion of the chamber, there is no doubt that the DFB evaded taxes, and that the parties involved condoned this", Distler said, adding that the DFB made "a catastrophic impression" in its reappraisal of the affair.
The DFB was officially ordered to pay €130,000, but €20,000 were waived due to a delay in proceedings contrary to the rule of law.
The case centred on a payment of €6.7 million the DFB sent via the ruling body FIFA to the late French businessman Robert Louis-Dreyfus in 2005.
Louis-Dreyfus had earlier sent a loan of 10 million Swiss francs to World Cup organizer Franz Beckenbauer. The sum then arrived in an account of now disgraced FIFA top official Mohamed bin Hammam of Qatar - for reasons not known.
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The DFB said the €6.7 million were for a World Cup gala event, which never took place, and put them down as operating expenses in 2006.
That eventually led to the trial because the public prosecutor's office named this inadmissible and said that the DFB evaded €2.7 million in taxes.
DFB lawyer Jan Olaf Leisner said that even though it was a concealed repayment, it could still be classified as a business expense, and thus no tax evasion took place.
Naming the DFB "the loser" in the case, Distler said it could have come clean via a voluntary disclosure in 2015, when the affair broke, but that this was not the case.
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"The clocks tick differently at the DFB. Lawyers' fees are being produced there in astronomical amounts. Responsibility is externalised by those responsible. Nobody must expect repercussions," Distler said.
Distler accused the DFB of a massive lack of interest in clarifying the events.
"No representative of the DFB took part in either the investigation or the trial. You have to ask: do they not take the justice system seriously?" she said.
The judge urged the current DFB leadership to establish "a culture of looking and not looking away" in the future.
Former DFB presidents Theo Zwanziger and Wolfgang Niersbach and ex secretary-general Horst R Schmidt were also defendants in the case along with the DFB as an entity.
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But they all paid sums to charity to have their cases dropped due to the complex nature of who knew what and when. The trio had consistently denied tax evasion.
"All three acted with the common will that the true reason for the payment should not be publicised, but concealed," Distler said.
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