According to a ruling by the Cologne Regional Court, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia is to pay Hamburg banker Christian Olearius 10,000 euros in damages for violating his personal rights. This emerges from the judgment published by the newspaper World on Sunday and the German Press Agency. The court justified its decision by saying that the plaintiff was entitled to compensation because the contents of his diaries confiscated by the state had been passed on to unauthorized third parties.
After taking evidence, the court came to the conclusion that the contents of the diaries must have reached journalists “from within the sphere of the defendant country.” According to the newspaper, the trial involved Olearius’ diaries, which officials confiscated during a raid into his possible involvement in illegal cum-ex stock trades in 2018. Two years later, several media outlets quoted from the recordings.
The judgment states that passing on or enabling access to the contents of the diaries constitutes a breach of official duty. “The defendant country has an obligation to store sensitive data in such a way that it is protected from unauthorized access. The chamber was unable to determine whether the data was intentionally passed on to unauthorized third parties.”
When asked by the newspaper, the Cologne Public Prosecutor’s Office, representing the state, said that it would examine the reasons for the judgment and then decide on possible legal remedies. “The verdict is the next step in a long series of judicial failures,” said a spokesman for Olearius. Olearius is a partner in the Hamburg private bank MM Warburg, which took part in cum-ex deals. The banker currently has to answer in 14 cases before the Bonn regional court on allegations of serious tax evasion; the damage is said to be almost 280 million euros.