STORY: In the Bonn Cum-Ex trial against former tax attorney Hanno Berger, the Bonn Regional Court imposed a prison sentence of eight years. Judge Roland Zickler said on Tuesday that Berger was guilty of three counts of serious tax evasion. The tax expert had shown considerable criminal energy. Berger is considered one of the intellectual fathers of the fraud system with which investors had a once-paid capital gains tax on stock dividends reimbursed twice by the tax office. The originally assumed amount of damage from the transactions between 2007 and 2011 was a good 278 million euros. Gerlinde Keller, spokeswoman for the Bonn District Court: “The chamber has named numerous criteria for the assessment of punishment, which had to be taken into account at the expense of the accused. The high criminal energy, the special importance of this type of white-collar crime, the extremely high tax damage that the tax authorities incurred. And that until the very end the defendant actually wanted to convince the court that he had done the right thing after all.” However, Berger’s defense sees it differently: “The client repeated his confession at the end. It may be that his presentations in between, about the legal situation as he saw it at the time and also his other legal statements gave the impression that as if he wanted to revise his confession. We see it differently. In fact, we saw that he also showed insight. It may be that the whole thing came across clumsily from him in the main hearing.” The 72-year-old Berger will review the verdict and then decide how to proceed, his defense attorney said.