“I’m not just a member of the state parliament, I’m also an entrepreneur,” says the controversial politician. CSU parliamentary group leader Kreuzer excludes Sauter’s return to the parliamentary group.
Alfred Sauter, Member of the State Parliament, defended his behavior in controversial mask deals after his legal success against the Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office. “I am not only a member of the state parliament, but also an entrepreneur,” he said Augsburger Allgemeine. The Higher Regional Court (OLG) Munich announced on Thursday that it saw Sauters’ actions, among others, “not fulfilling the offense of bribery and bribery of mandate holders.” “The decision speaks for itself,” said Sauter of the newspaper. He and the ex-member of the Bundestag Georg Nüßlein had submitted complaints.
However, the public prosecutor’s office has already announced that it will lodge a complaint with the Federal Court of Justice. The OLG judges had also criticized the current legal situation to which they were bound, strikingly and clearly.
In the course of the mask affair, Sauter resigned from the CSU parliamentary group in March and thus anticipated an exclusionary process. About his relationship with CSU boss Markus Söder, he said: “He has not spoken a word with him since then”. Nüßlein and Sauter are said to have received a lot of money for the mediation of mask shops in 2020, Nüßlein 660,000 euros, Sauter even more than a million.
The public prosecutor’s office had initiated a preliminary investigation against the two and an entrepreneur, inter alia, on suspicion of corruption. The basis is Section 108e of the Criminal Code – Bribery and bribery of elected officials. All three had defended themselves against search warrants and property arrests before the OLG. Nüßlein and Sauter now get the money back from the shops. In the Sauter case, unlike the other two, according to the court, the search warrant was already illegal.
Sauter’s return to the parliamentary group still seems impossible. The OLG decision “does not change anything for us in the fact that Alfred Sauter needed his position as a mandate holder in order to enrich himself personally in the pandemic,” said CSU parliamentary group leader Thomas Kreuzer. Green parliamentary group deputy Florian Siekmann said the upcoming committee of inquiry into the mask deals was “more important than ever”.