ACTIONS CORNER
Rolf-Ernst Breuer has been spared a lengthy criminal trial. The proceedings at Munich District Court against the former CEO of Deutsche Bank were stayed with no ruling on 19 December on payment of €350,000. Breuer is therefore still considered as without criminal record. Judge Anton Winkler had proposed this compromise, because among other things the prospects of success for the prosecution were small. Breuer had been accused of having lied in a previous civil case brought against him and the bank by the late Leo Kirch. Since February, he is also a defendant in currently dormant proceedings for damages by the media mogul against the bank at the Higher Regional Court. The Chamber is accused of bias.
Prosecutors have found the Deutsche Bank partly to blame in the case of a multimillion-dollar tax fraud with CO2 emission rights. Without its participation the VAT reimbursements could never have been procured, lead prosecutor Attorney General Thomas Gonder argued before the Regional Court of Frankfurt. The six defendants unjustifiably collected a total of more than €230 million in VAT from the tax office for certificates they had obtained from abroad and sold to the bank. The court sentenced the six accused to sometimes long prison sentences and is still investigating seven employees of Deutsche Bank. The bank itself is not charged.
The French competition authority on 8 December imposed an antitrust fine of €92.3 million on Henkel. The Autorité de la Concurrence found it proven that the detergent producer had in 1997-2004, together with Procter & Gamble, Colgate Palmolive and Unilever, illegally fixed prices of, among other things, the detergent “Persil”. The Düsseldorf-based company said it accepted neither the fine nor the legal evaluation. Henkel announced its intention to appeal against the penalty.
In connection with the Siemens corruption scandal, the SEC, the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI have filed a complaint against several former employees of the electronics company, including former board member Uriel Sharef. As the authorities announced on 13 December, the managers were allegedly involved in a 100 million dollar bribe deal to secure a major contract worth a billion dollars from the Argentine government for the construction of a new identity card system. The bribes allegedly went in part to senior government officials.