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Status: December 15, 2021 6:28 p.m.
Investigators are investigating the suspicion of whether bribery payments were made to public officials in the Emix mask deals or were planned. According to information from, they have concrete clues NDR, WDR and SZ but not.
According to a search warrant, the Munich public prosecutor’s office is investigating whether the Emix mask business with German ministries may have withheld millions in commissions for possible bribery payments in order to bribe public officials. This suspicion of bribery is directed against unknown persons.
Specifically, it is about the purchases made by the Federal Ministry of Health from the Swiss trading company Emix. In the spring of last year, they had supplied the federal government with corona masks and other protective clothing worth around 700 million euros. The masks were sometimes significantly more expensive than the offers of other providers. The Federal Ministry of Health paid an average of EUR 5.58 for an FFP2 mask, the Ministry of Health in Bavaria EUR 8.90 and the Ministry of Health in North Rhine-Westphalia EUR 9.90.
Commissions in the tens of millions
The mask deals to German ministries were brokered by the Munich PR entrepreneur Andrea Tandler and her business partner. According to the public prosecutor’s office, the two are said to have received a commission of more than 48 million euros from the Emix company. The money laundering investigations are not directed against those responsible for Emix. The Federal Ministry of Health did not comment on the public prosecutor’s suspicion of corruption.
According to the investigators’ findings, the 48 million euros commission was transferred in three parts between May and December 2020. The recipient was a company owned by Andrea Tandler and a business partner, Little Penguin, in Grünwald near Munich.
Have bribes been planned?
Because the commission is so extraordinarily high and the prices Germany paid were well above average, prosecutors suspect that Little Penguin may have held part of the millions in trust in case public officials should ask for money to make the deal possible. However, the public prosecutor’s office did not provide any concrete evidence for this suspicion.
According to the investigators, the fact that Tandler was hired by Emix to broker the mask deals can best be explained by her connections in politics, the decision says. So Ms. Tandler actually got through an SMS contact with Monika Hohlmeier (CSU), the daughter of the former Bavarian Prime Minister Franz Josef Strauss, that her offer landed with Health Minister Jens Spahn and the then Bavarian Health Minister Melanie Huml (CSU).
Hohlmeier has repeatedly emphasized that she neither benefited financially from the brokerage of the mask offers, nor did she know at what prices and with what profit margins the masks were sold to the ministries. There are no investigations against Hohlmeier.
Trader suspected of money laundering
There are no bribery investigations against Andrea Tandler and her business partner. However, the two are under investigation on suspicion of money laundering. There is also the allegation that the joint company Little Penguin has improperly cheated on business taxes and thus saved 4.2 million euros in taxes. Whether or not all of the suspicions are true remains to be seen. If the allegations are not proven, an investigation will be discontinued.
The public prosecutor’s office has already investigated purchases of masks by the Bavarian Ministry of Health for almost nine million euros at Emix. The result is that there was no wrongdoing in Bavaria’s Ministry of Health. Tandler had also brokered an Emix mask business with the North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of Health worth a good five million euros. The public prosecutor’s office in Düsseldorf looked at this business. So far there have been no indications of a hidden offsetting of bribe payments.
Searches also with Emix owners
The two Emix owners, the young Zurich entrepreneurs Jascha Rudolphi and Luca Steffen, also received an unannounced visit on Tuesday. The Munich public prosecutor’s office had their cell phones secured by way of legal assistance. However, there is no investigation against Rudolphi and Steffen. You will be brought as a witness.
In circles of those who are directly or indirectly affected by the investigation, the current proceedings of the public prosecutor’s office are brought into connection with a committee of inquiry now set up in the Bavarian state parliament. The U-Committee is supposed to clear up mask deals in which CSU politicians have played a role. The public prosecutor’s office may not want to be accused of having done nothing in the Tandler case in the U Committee, is a thesis for the current searches.