Berlin – A 19-year-old buys a villa even though he has no income. A Hartz IV recipient acquires a property worth millions: tax evaders, mafia and drug gangs from all over the world “wash” billions in this way in Germany because it is so easy. Now it’s even easier for them.
Because on August 1st, an amendment to Paragraph 44 by the Bundestag came into force. According to this, notaries who notarize real estate transactions are prohibited from reporting suspected money laundering via the notary supervision to the Central Office for Financial Transaction Investigations (FIU) of the customs due to the duty of confidentiality.
This means that a regulation that has only been in force since last October, which stipulated a corresponding reporting obligation, has become obsolete. It is unclear who exactly brought the new passage, according to which notaries are exempted from it, into the finance committee’s draft in June and why no one noticed the problem.
Berlin’s Justice Senator Dirk Behrendt (Greens) announced a Federal Council initiative on Thursday to restore the old legal situation. Because the revised law now provides that notaries are only allowed to report a situation if they have certain knowledge of a money laundering case. “It is almost impossible for a notary to have certain knowledge of this. Because then he would make the aid punishable, “said prosecutor Susann Wettley on Thursday.
Prosecutor: We provide an environment in which criminals can act freely
Berlin is the only federal state that has had a “money laundering task force” for notary supervision since last year, which checks the approximately 680 notaries. From April 2020 to July 27 of this year, the two lawyers and three judicial officers investigated 86 suspicious transaction reports and reported them to the FIU. “These reports are now prohibited by law,” said Susanne Wettley. The prosecutor used numbers to explain how necessary such tests are: In 2018, 77,252 suspected cases were reported to the FIU in Germany every year. Only eight came from notaries. After the “Real Estate Money Laundering Registration Ordinance” came into force in October 2020, there were 1,600 notaries nationwide.
“Anyone who wants to launder money through a real estate business or in the community can now go to a notary with no worries,” says Wettley. “Because even if he should develop a suspicion, he should no longer report it. And if the task force comes to review and sees this issue, it is not allowed to report it. That means: We offer an environment in which criminals are free to act because it is deliberately not controlled. “
Wettley gave another example: a property that is assigned to a person of organized crime. This man goes to a notary and has a piece of paper made that says that the owner of this paper is the owner of a land charge of over one million euros. This owner’s letter of land charge is entered in the land register. It does not say who is the owner of the land charge. It’s always whoever this letter belongs to. If you encumber your property in this way, at some point it is no longer worth anything. Neither the public prosecutor’s office can then have financial arrests, nor the tax office, a tax debt, nor can a creditor enforce his claims. Now neither notaries nor the task force are allowed to report such oddities.
Did a lobby association of notaries participate in the regulation?
The prosecutor urgently warned such controls: “If you don’t set up speed cameras on the autobahn, everyone will eventually exceed the maximum speed.”
It is unclear whether a lobby association for notaries participated in the change in the law, said Justice Senator Behrendt. “This assumption can only be supported by the nice question: Who is it good for? It’s pretty obvious that there’s a connection, ”he said. “But I have no clues. There are also quite a number of lawyers and notaries who are members of the German Bundestag. “
However, the Federal Chamber of Notaries and the German Notaries Association welcomed the newly introduced reporting obligation in October: “The Federal Chamber of Notaries had advocated this for a long time,” said the President of the Federal Chamber of Notaries, Jens Bormann. “The regulation will lead to a significant increase in reports by notaries and thus also have an increased deterrent effect.” In the event of a mere suspicion of money laundering, they are prohibited from reporting because of their strict duty of confidentiality, otherwise they would have made themselves liable to prosecution, so Bormann .
However, not all notaries agreed with the new regulation. In February, the Berlin Administrative Court rejected an urgent application from a notary who viewed a suspicious transaction report as a disproportionate interference with his freedom of occupation. Now the Bundestag helped him.
Two thirds of all suspected cases concerned entrepreneurial companies
With the Federal Council initiative, the future government should not only be asked to initiate another revision of the law. A reporting obligation should no longer only apply to real estate. It should also be used for companies because this area is also prone to money laundering.
Two thirds of all suspected cases that the task force reported to the FIU related to corporate law matters. For cases like this: A man from the organized crime milieu paid 12,500 euros in share capital for the establishment of a GmbH from a suitcase full of cash, even though he received social benefits. The GmbH was the administrator of one of the 77 properties of the Remmo clan confiscated in Berlin.
“The criminals invest their money in real estate and also pay excessive prices,” said Behrendt. “That also has an effect on the rent level.” Germany should not be seen as a money laundering paradise.
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