It was a memorable appearance on July 27, 2022: a blue baseball cap on his head, an FFP2 mask on his face and mirrored sunglasses. Andrea Tandler enters the state parliament as if masked. She was summoned by the Maske investigative committee to explain her brokerage activities for the Swiss company Emix. She walks past the waiting journalists without a word. And Tandler also remained silent in front of the committee members; at the time, public prosecutor’s investigations were underway against her.
Nevertheless, several MPs were annoyed. Ultimately, the focus was on the political processing of mask purchases, says criminal lawyer Frank Saliger from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU): “During this emergency time in spring 2020, mask sales were carried out on an incredible scale. Politicians got involved and made contacts to private companies that made a lot of money – money that the taxpayer paid for.”
Accusation against Tandler: 23.5 million euros in evaded taxes
Andrea Tandler is not just anyone, but the daughter of the former CSU general secretary Gerold Tandler, who was also interior minister, economics and transport minister and finance minister under Prime Ministers Franz Joseph Straß and Max Streibl. Andrea Tandler has close contacts in the CSU. During the first Corona wave in March 2020, the Swiss trading company Emix brought them into contact with state authorities in Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia and the federal government.
Monika Hohlmeier, daughter of Franz Josef Strauß and MEP, helps her friend Andrea Tandler with initial contact. Hohlmeier repeatedly asserted that she did not receive any compensation for this. The fact is: Emix sells protective clothing and masks to various ministries worth more than 700 million euros, sometimes at high prices: while other masks were cheaper, the Swiss company received 8.90 euros per mask. After the political process, it is now about the accusation of tax evasion: Tandler is said to have not properly taxed her 48 million euros in commission. The public prosecutor’s office accuses her of having evaded 23.5 million euros in taxes.
Accusation: Taxed through a company in Grünwald instead of as a private individual
Tandler is said to have billed the commissions from the mask business not as a private individual, but through one of her companies, according to the public prosecutor’s office. And not through her Munich company, whose signature she is said to have used when initiating mask purchases, but through a second company founded at the same time and based in the Munich suburb of Grünwald. The trade tax there is only half as high as in Munich. The question is therefore where Tandler carried out the brokerage activities from – in Munich or in Grünwald. It is also about a possible unpaid gift tax: Tandler gave part of the commission to her partner – from the perspective of the public prosecutor’s office without his business involvement.
In addition, Tandler received 9,000 euros in Corona emergency aid, even though she was not entitled to it, according to another part of the indictment. So it’s about tax evasion and subsidy fraud. The allegations are serious, says criminal law professor Saliger: “The regional court here in Munich admitted the prosecution’s charges in full, i.e. the legal opinion of the public prosecutor’s office that it was not in order under tax law, both in terms of income tax and gift tax most recently the trade tax.”
Tandler and her partner have been in custody since January
Tandler and her partner were arrested at the end of January this year on suspicion of tax evasion. Since then they have been in custody in Munich’s Stadelheim prison. The court and public prosecutor saw a risk of a possible escape because the Tandler family owns a property in Switzerland.
According to the guidelines of the Federal Court of Justice, a prison sentence with probation is no longer possible for tax fraud of more than one million euros – unless the defendant can present significant mitigating circumstances, according to white collar criminal law expert Saliger. The legal approach to tax evasion has become significantly stricter: “For decades, tax offenses were considered trivial offenses. At the beginning of the new millennium, people have come to see tax offenses as misdemeanors and crimes.”
Mask shops themselves are not the subject of the process
The public prosecutor’s preliminary investigation into possible corruption yielded nothing and was discontinued. The process is not about the provision of masks per se, but rather about the way in which Tandler dealt with the commission, explains the chair of criminal law at the LMU: “This is not about the accusation of corruption either, because the allegations against the European MP Monika Hohlmeier have not been substantiated. The main accused are entrepreneurs.”
“Tandler had excellent contacts”
And these entrepreneurs took up brokerage activities that cannot be condemned per se: “In the business world, the entrepreneurs who have the best contacts and information usually prevail. Due to her biography, Ms. Tandler had excellent contacts with state and federal ministries “, mediated through her friend Ms. Hohlmeier. Both families are still very closely connected to each other from the Strauss era. It’s part of doing business that contacts are used,” says Saliger.
A total of eight days of negotiations are scheduled. A spokesman for the regional court announced that Tandler would comment in detail on the allegations at the start of the trial. A verdict is expected in mid-November.