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Banker jailed for cum-ex deals
In the third criminal trial surrounding the Cum-Ex tax scandal at the Bonn Regional Court, a former banker at the private bank MM Warburg was sentenced to three years and six months in prison. The court on Wednesday found the former risk analyst at MM Warburg guilty of two counts of tax evasion. As managing director of an investment company, he set up two funds aimed at cum-ex transactions to the detriment of the state treasury. Between 2009 and 2010, the cum-ex transactions in which the accused was involved led to tax losses of almost 110 million euros, said the presiding judge. It is a particularly serious case. The confession of the accused had a mitigating effect. Its defender Ingo Heuel said: “You can get a rough idea of where the chamber would have ended up without a confession. I think you got that from the explanations. The chamber said that they would then spend the seven years that the public prosecutor’s office originally asked for isn’t entirely unreasonable, then you can consider roughly how much the confession and also the reconnaissance that our client provided was taken into account overall at the sentencing level, but you’ve also heard that we ended up with some Legal things differently, not in the area of facts, with some legal things we see things a little differently than the chamber saw. And we now have to wait for the written reasons and then just see how it goes.” The defense had emphasized in the process that the ex-banker had not earned a single euro through the transactions and had testified extensively in the process. The convict himself described the business as the “biggest mistake of his professional life”. The German state suffered billions in damage from the cum-ex deals. Investors had the capital gains tax paid once on stock dividends reimbursed several times with the help of banks. The cases had spread widely, which is why there are always searches at banks and law firms.
According to the court, between 2009 and 2010 the cum-ex transactions in which the accused was involved led to tax losses of almost 110 million euros.