It is well known that the lawyer and member of parliament Alfred Sauter is very enterprising. Now it turns out that the long-standing CSU politician apparently wanted to benefit a lot more from the corona pandemic than was previously known. Sauter is said to have demanded a fee of one million euros for his work as a lawyer for the law firm Gauweiler & Sauter in the approval of a corona test system. That came up on Friday in the mask inquiry committee in the Bavarian state parliament.
Frederico Bürsgens, head of the medical device company GNA Biosolutions, testified in the sub-committee. In 2020, the GNA company developed a new rapid test system for the corona virus. But there were problems with the approval of the test device with the name Octea by the responsible Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices (BfArM). The GNA company then switched on the law firm of the CSU politicians and ex-ministers Peter Gauweiler and Alfred Sauter in December 2020. Sauter took over the mandate and also approached the Bavarian State Chancellery on this matter.
After the Federal Institute granted a special license for Octea one day before Christmas 2020, the Gauweiler & Sauter law firm demanded a fee in 2021. Bürsgens testified in the U-Committee that, as far as he could remember, Sauter had demanded one million euros. It was then possible to negotiate Sauter down to 300,000 euros. The fact that the Gauweiler & Sauter law firm had invoiced and received these 300,000 euros from GNA at the beginning of February 2021 was confirmed in April 2021 by the Southgerman newspaper known.
What is new is that, according to GNA boss Bürsgens, Sauter is said to have demanded a much higher amount. It would then have been a second million-dollar fee for the lawyer Sauter in connection with the pandemic. At the beginning of 2021, the CSU politician secretly collected more than 1.2 million euros in commission for the procurement of corona protective masks to the Bavarian Ministry of Health via a company owned by his daughters. This was revealed a little later by investigations by the Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office.
“An ambitious demand, to say the least”
The investigative committee set up at the instigation of the Greens, SPD and FDP is intended to clarify how the mask shops worked in detail, from which the member of parliament Sauter and also the then CSU member of the Bundestag Georg Nüßlein had secretly made money. The investigation also includes the processes surrounding the company GNA Biosolutions. The committee also wanted to hear Sauter himself on Friday.
Sauter again refused to testify; like a few weeks ago when it came to the mask shops. The MP exercised his right not to speak again on Friday. As the committee chairman and former Minister of Justice Winfried Bausback (CSU) explained, Sauter is entitled to this as the person concerned. Bausback said after the meeting about Sauter’s obvious million-dollar claim in the GNA case, “that was not known before and was not apparent from the files.” Bausback said that this was “an ambitious demand from the outside, to put it mildly”. The former Minister of Justice limited this to the effect that he himself had never worked as a lawyer.
In his testimony, GNA boss Bürsgens also described the 300,000 euros that were ultimately paid instead of the million apparently demanded by Sauter as “very, very high”. However, the company GNA Biosolutions then decided to pay in order to avoid a possible legal dispute.