Anyone who works little pays little tax and little social security contributions – that’s logical. However, criminal entrepreneurs took advantage of this for their own purposes, which is why five men are now waiting for their criminal trial before the Economic Criminal Chamber of the Munich I Regional Court.
At the end of October, the public prosecutor’s office filed two charges against the five accused from the construction industry. They are said to have evaded taxes and social security contributions amounting to around 5.5 million euros. Years ago, the Federal Court of Justice laid down as a guideline that a prison sentence is mandatory for evaded sums of more than one million euros.
The scam used by the accused around the building contractor T. was as follows: They only registered their workers for social security with a small number of hours per month. The monthly wage is also calculated based on this number of hours and, among other things, the wage tax. In reality, however, they paid the workers a large part of their wages in secret – 6.2 million euros are said to have flowed this way.
The workers were able to decide for themselves how much should be paid legally and how much should be paid out – possibly without the awareness that low official wage payments would later have a negative impact on the amount of pension. In order to get cash and conceal the black money payments, the alleged perpetrators posted fictitious invoices from at least 16 other companies, some of which were also controlled from the background by the accused.
In July 2022, around 90 searches began in Germany, Serbia, Romania, Spain and France. Around 200 witnesses and suspects were interviewed. In addition to the language barrier, there was often the problem that the employees benefited from the system themselves or received social benefits in parallel to their work. Therefore, they often had little interest in helping the investigating authorities and incriminating their employers. In some cases, possible witnesses were probably intimidated and threatened by the alleged perpetrators.
The public prosecutor’s office handed over around 100 volumes of investigation files to the regional court along with the charges. That, in the form of the Commercial Criminal Chamber, must now decide whether the charges will be admitted and when the trial will begin.