On Friday morning, Alexander B. comes to what is probably his most difficult lecture to date. Shortly before ten he enters the room in the Frankfurt Justice Center, which was his place of employment for more than 20 years, wears handcuffs and balances a folder with his file on his forearms. His bags under his eyes suggest a restless night in prison. This morning he will make a life confession, revealing intimate details about his violent father and his love life. He will confess to having taken bribes over the years in criminal proceedings he conducted himself. He can later read from the penultimate of 19 pages that he can “be grateful to the public prosecutor’s office for pulling me out of this swamp”. “I couldn’t have done it alone.”
He of all people, the prominent corruption fighter, a nationwide expert on billing fraud in the healthcare sector, is said to have diverted hundreds of thousands of euros for himself? His colleagues at the agency were shocked when B. was arrested two and a half years ago in the summer. In the closely networked Hessian legal scene, everyone was stunned. Because B. was a typical senior public prosecutor, overly correct, Prussian in demeanor, flawless in expression. One who was able to fill the politician’s phrase about the “hardness of the rule of law” with life, not least as spokesman for the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office. Some joked that B. was the secret head of the authorities.
When his office was accessed at the end of July 2020, this facade collapsed. About two years later, last summer, investigators sent the district court a 260-page indictment. They count 101 cases of continued and commercial corruption, 55 cases of serious breach of trust and several cases of tax evasion. 645,000 euros in financial loss for the state of Hesse, just in the cases that are not yet statute-barred.
System B. was as simple as it was efficient
Since the day of his arrest, B. has been in custody, interrupted by four months of freedom. In the first few weeks in prison, he said he began to come to terms with his failure. He takes therapy sessions, has paid his tax debts and other amounts, and is ready to take “criminal and personal” responsibility for his actions. “I severely abused the trust of my former colleagues,” he says, “and caused serious damage to the reputation of the Hessian judiciary overall.”
System B. was as simple as it was efficient. As head of the “Central Office for Combating Property Crimes in the Health Care System” he was primarily on the trail of suspected billing fraudsters. He brought pharmacists to court who billed twice, investigated senior and chief physicians in hospitals, he uncovered transport services that cheated health insurance companies for years. Above all, however, he is said to have deliberately produced a considerable number of discontinued procedures, for which the state treasury bore the costs and from which he always made a profit. Many of these proceedings should probably never have been conducted in this way.
“I was aware of the wrongness of my actions”
Together with a school friend and entrepreneur who was also accused, he founded a company in 2005, which he commissioned with expert work. From 2010 to 2020 alone, the company took in 12.5 million euros at the expense of the state treasury, according to the indictment. The true ownership structure remained hidden from the judiciary – but no one had asked, and there was no trace of the authorities’ self-regulation. B. is said to have received 280,000 euros from this company, transferred to an account owned by his school friend, who was also accused, for which B. had cards and access data. B. is said to have received another 66,000 euros from a second company.
“I was aware of the injustice of my actions,” he said on Friday. Previously, he had described his mother’s excessive demands and his abusive father’s alcoholism, told how he threw himself into work to suppress his inner abysses. And he spoke about the happiness he initially felt with his longtime partner, one of his assessors, who was already a mother of two. She didn’t know how to handle money, and he supported her financially, with bribes, on and on. In the end it was she who reported B. He now faces a long prison sentence. It will continue next week, with a statement from B’s friend who was also accused.