The heavy wooden door, the security lock, up the stairs to room 104. When Franz Rieger marches into the Regensburg district court this Monday, some things will seem familiar to him. He’s a lawyer in Regensburg, he knows this building very well. And yet everything will be different for Rieger. Because he’s not coming as a lawyer. He comes as a defendant.
It is the fourth trial in the adventurous affair about Regensburg’s politicians and their strange proximity to the local construction industry. In the first two trials, the former SPD politician and ex-mayor Joachim Wolbergs was convicted of accepting benefits or taking bribes – but last Thursday the Federal Court of Justice overturned the first judgment against him. Wolbergs has to answer again for allegations of corruption. In the third trial, the court found the former CSU city councilor Christian Schlegl guilty of aiding and abetting tax evasion. Well, in process number four, the accused is called Franz Rieger, ex-city councilor and ex-district chairman of the CSU, for whom he has been in the state parliament since 2008. The allegations against him: extortion and aiding and abetting tax evasion.
What is it specifically about? On the one hand there is the 60,000 euros that Rieger is said to have demanded from a Regensburg building contractor in the summer of the 2013 state election campaign, combined with this sentence: “You already know who will decide on the building areas and the building permits in the future?” As a city councilor, Rieger had at least an indirect influence on certain construction projects. The entrepreneur, from whom Rieger is said to have asked for 60,000 euros, belongs to the group of property developers who also donated to Wolbergs. He has already accepted a penal order for bribing the former OB.
In the trial against Wolbergs, the entrepreneur appeared like a key witness. In the courtroom, his statements had also been read out to the criminal police. Among other things, the entrepreneur spoke of the “gradations in begging” that he had experienced with politicians in Regensburg. While Wolbergs acted like a supplicant, Rieger forced him to donate. It was also important to Rieger that no donation exceeded the legal publication threshold of 10,000 euros.
Rieger is said to have paid election campaign costs using bogus bills
What the public prosecutor’s office reproaches Rieger with: that he and his campaign manager Peter Kittel are said to have settled campaign costs using bogus bills. Kittel is a colorful figure in Regensburg, networked in politics and business. Every year he organizes the famous Christmas market at Thurn und Taxis Castle. Kittel also has to answer in court from Monday – for aiding and abetting tax evasion. In turn, the aforementioned building contractor is said to have taken over the election campaign bills for Rieger in order to disguise the flow of money. This is a total of almost 30,000 euros.
And then there are another almost 50,000 euros that Rieger is said to have received in the 2013 state election campaign from another building contractor from Regensburg. The money possibly flowed illegally through straw men of the entrepreneur, who was convicted in June 2019 because the court recognized the intention that he wanted to influence ex-Mayor Wolbergs politically with his donations. In an email that SZ has received, a former employee of the building contractor instructs four colleagues to donate 9,950 euros each to Rieger. In the mail it goes on to say: “I have the data with me, I paid every one of you 10,000 with your salary yesterday.” Corporate donations could therefore have been disguised as private donations and their origin concealed by keeping the individual amounts just below the 10,000 euro threshold.
The Rieger case is also noteworthy because the CSU politician asked the former mayor Wolbergs to resign at the beginning of the Regensburg affair and said: “The donation and corruption affair is an affair between Wolberg and his SPD. And it remains theirs alone Problem.” At least now that he is in the dock, Rieger himself has a problem.
There is a threat of expulsion from the CSU
There is a lot at stake for him not only in terms of criminal law, but also politically. After the affair of dubious deals by CSU MPs with corona protective masks, party leader Markus Söder has announced “zero tolerance for violations of our code of conduct”. The CSU Code of Conduct says about party donations: “They must be transparent and must not be tied to conditions or individual expectations.” So if it turns out that Rieger concealed donations and linked them to decisions about construction projects, he is threatened with expulsion from the CSU. After the prosecutor had brought charges, CSU General Secretary Markus Blume had already distanced himself from Rieger. “These are serious allegations. We expect a quick and complete clarification in court,” said Blume and refrained from any form of assistance.
Rieger himself did not want to comment on SZ’s request shortly before the start of the process. So far, he has always denied all allegations. Rieger’s co-accused election campaign manager Kittel also had the allegations against him dismissed through his lawyer Michael Reinhart immediately after the indictment in January 2020. About the blackmail allegations against Rieger, his defense attorney Dirk Lammer said at the time: “Not everyone who says he feels blackmailed has been blackmailed in the legal sense.” The allegations in no way constituted extortion. It was also “not true that Mr. Rieger made such statements”, according to which he could have linked donations to construction projects, said Lammer. The fact that some donors are supposed to have been straw men is “legally very questionable”. And Rieger was “not involved” in the alleged bogus bills.
Several judges may be biased
So, is it all just hot air? In any case, there is one more sentence that one of the construction contractors put on the record. When he asked him about donations, Rieger is said to have said that he had “excellent contacts with the local judiciary”. It fits into the picture that six Regensburg judges reported a possible bias before the trial. Judge Elke Escher, who led the first Wolbergs trial, stated, for example, that she knew Rieger from college days and that she often took part in the “partly private parties” of the CSU politician.
For the Rieger trial, eight days of hearing are initially scheduled, with 18 witnesses to testify. A judgment could still be given in November.