“White-collar criminals and tax evaders with resources such as expensive law firms are dismissed too quickly from criminal proceedings,” Anne Brorhilker, the former lead prosecutors in Germany’s cum-ex proceedings who stepped back earlier this year, said in an interview. “The financial lobby in Germany is so strong and has so many resources to push through its interests that a counterweight is needed,” she added in view of her career switch to NGO Finanzwende.
Within the cum-ex investigations, charges have been brought against a total of 18 defendants in 11 proceedings while a total of 133 investigations involving around 1,700 defendants are pending, according to the public prosecutor’s office in Cologne, which oversees the investigations. Not a single charge has been brought, however, since the resignation of lead prosecutor Brorhilker in April, according to Handelsblatt.
The sluggish process is, according to Brorhilker — who was involved in the investigations from 2013 — due to the proximity between business and politics on the one hand and structural problems on the other hand, including too few investigators, an outdated IT system, excessive bureaucracy and a lack of cooperation between public authorities.
“It was not possible for me to organize a video conference with all my investigators or to include everyone in one email,” Brorhilker said in view of the data protection laws in different German states. “That’s completely absurd, it’s a basic function that doesn’t work in Germany.”
While other European countries, such as Denmark and France, have showcased much more political will in pursuing the tax fraud scandal, German lawmakers have recently made a breakthrough more unlikely, according to Brorhilker.
The so-called fourth bureaucracy reduction act, which came into force in October, shortens the retention periods for accounting documents and invoices — which could, in criminal proceedings, serve as key evidence — from 10 to eight years, while the statute of limitations remains 15 years.
With regards to the cum-cum investigations in particular “this is bitter” Brorhilker said, adding that German prosecutors, unlike their foreign colleagues, are yet to investigate around 99 percent of the cases which are estimated to have cost the German state nearly €30 billion.
“This law means we will probably never see any of this money again,” she said.