As if eleven days of negotiations weren’t enough, the eight defendants in the corruption and fraud trial involving the state building authority in Nuremberg had to wait a quarter of an hour longer for their guilty verdict on Wednesday – a lawyer arrived late. After his arrival, the verdicts were handed down by the district court in Nuremberg-Fürth. The court sentenced one defendant to a fine of 150,000 euros, four suspects to suspended sentences of between nine months and two years and another to three years and six months in prison. The main accused, a former employee of the building authority, was sentenced to five years and six months for fraud, taking advantage and taking bribes, and his wife, who was also accused, was acquitted.
The court remained below the demands of the public prosecutor’s office. Above all, it honored the “value of self-disclosure” that four defendants had made and thus decisively advanced the investigations of the public prosecutor’s office. Previously, employees in the building authority had noticed irregularities in billing.
The court saw it as proven that several defendants had set up a fraudulent billing system together over the years in order to cheat the state building authority out of large sums of money and to split the profits among themselves – which the defendants did not pay tax on, for obvious reasons. Originally, the public prosecutor’s office had therefore accused the accused of tax evasion; however, she dropped this charge because it did not carry significant weight compared to the others.
The former employee of the building authority is said to have started the fraudulent practice in 2011 with an employee of a construction company. The court ruled that the former employee of the building authority had repeatedly approved overstated, sometimes completely fabricated invoices over the years. The presiding judge Mark Leppich spoke of a “high criminal energy” and called the procedure “somewhat bold”.
From the point of view of the court, the public prosecutor’s office could not prove that his wife, who was also accused, helped to conceal payment flows (as other accused were also accused of doing with the help of subcontractors).
In the verdict, the presiding judge, Leppich, described it as a “very difficult task” to find the balance between honoring the assistance and punishing the deeds. At the beginning of the trial, he said it was “extraordinary that a case of this dimension was uncovered.” Although the building is structurally susceptible to fraud, it is almost never possible for the public prosecutor to uncover crimes. “There is a lot of money on the way and at the same time it is far too easy to let this money disappear.” Leppich said the voluntary disclosures avoided a “battle of experts and witnesses.”
The public prosecutor had demanded eight years and three months in prison for the former employee of the building authority for fraud, bribery and accepting advantages, the defense a maximum of six years. For the other defendants, the public prosecutor’s office had requested sentences ranging from one year’s probation to six years’ imprisonment.
According to the public prosecutor, the building authority has suffered damage totaling around 4.5 million euros since 2017. Because fraud becomes statute-barred after five years, the presumed previous offenses could no longer be prosecuted. The court ordered several defendants to confiscate money; in a case of about 2.5 million euros. The judgments are not yet final.