Duet Group process continues

2023-08-17 14:57:04

From Thursday, the Bonn Regional Court will again be dealing with the involvement of the British financial service provider Duet Group in the international cum-ex scandal. Co-founder Henry Gabay and S., who also worked as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch before Duet, are facing charges of tax evasion before the 9th Greater Criminal Court. The Cologne public prosecutor’s office accuses the two defendants of having organized the share group transactions around the dividend record date from London (Az. 29 KLs 1/23). Specifically, it is about the “Caerus II Equity Fund”, which was launched in 2010 by Varengold Investment AG.

The Treasury suffered damage of 92 million euros as a result of the multiple reimbursement of capital gains tax. Duet is also said to have been active in cum-ex transactions by the now insolvent Munich issuing house Avana Invest. Here, the investigations of the Bavarian public prosecutors are not yet complete.

First verdict in June

The presiding judge at the Bonn district court, Frederik Glasner, has scheduled 17 more days of trial for the criminal trial until December. In the early trial, a former Duet back office employee had already admitted his involvement in the illegal stock transactions. Glasner sentenced him to two years probation for aiding and abetting tax evasion. Another former employee had testified in Bonn in early summer and heavily incriminated Henry Gabay. The investment banker was temporarily arrested by police officers in France in June 2020, but then, like other defendants, was released on bail. The Swiss native had denied any wrongdoing in the past. Another Duet manager accused by the Cologne public prosecutor will have to answer in court at a later date.

Hanno Mußler Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 7 Marcus Jung Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 18 Marcus Jung, Bonn Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 19

The law enforcement agency, which is in charge of investigating the cum-ex deals in Germany, has itself been criticized for some time. The starting point was the investigations by the Cologne public prosecutors against the Hamburg tax authorities and the former SPD member of the Bundestag Johannes Kahrs in autumn 2021, two days after the federal elections. The prosecutors hoped that this would provide further information for their investigations into the private bank MM Warburg.

NRW Minister of Justice Benjamin Limbach (Greens): Image: dpa

But for more than two years, a parliamentary investigative committee in Hamburg has been trying to clarify the tax money affair surrounding the private bank – and possible political influence by Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD), who was still the first mayor of the Hanseatic city in 2016. Numerous files from Cologne were reminded by the parliamentarians for a long time in vain.

Minister of Justice massively upset

NRW Minister of Justice Benjamin Limbach (Greens) was not informed about the events – and was accordingly upset. In order to mend the troubled relationship, Limbach sent a delegation from his ministry to the Elbe. In the middle of the dispute over the files, Limbach said goodbye to the senior public prosecutor in Cologne, Joachim Roth, who was retiring in July.

On Wednesday, Limbach followed up with sharp criticism in the Düsseldorf state parliament. His house was sometimes informed too late or not at all: “I would not have expected in the justice department that this cornerstone of our work could break away like this,” the dpa news agency quoted the justice minister as saying.