Bernd Otto

This article covers the manager Bernd Otto; on the jazz musician and author see Bernd K. Otto .

Bernd Otto (born September 9, 1940 in Wuppertal ) is a German manager. He is the former CEO of the trading company co op AG , Frankfurt am Main. He was one of the main defendants in the white collar crime proceedings related to the co-op scandal in the late 1980s.

Life

Otto first learned the trade of dyer . He received his university entrance qualification via the second educational path and studied economics at the University of Cologne . He graduated in 1966 with a degree in economics . Then he was secretary at the German Federation of Trade Unions in Frankfurt. While working, he did his doctorate with Otto Blume in 1970 on the subject: "The efforts of the trade unions in the German Reich and in the Federal Republic of Germany to develop a concept of inter-company co-determination". In 1974 he moved to co op AG, which had been founded as a stock corporation two years earlier, as Labor Director ; from 1980 he was its chairman.

co op AG and criminal proceedings

The shares of co op AG were floated on the stock exchange in 1987. In October 1988, Der Spiegel published a critical article entitled Rebuilt and Hollowed Out about balance sheet manipulation and asset shifts in society. Otto and his two board colleagues, Dieter Hoffmann and Werner Caspar, were dismissed without notice in December 1988.

The board members were accused of having illegally enriched themselves in the co-op group in the course of the 1980s through foreign companies, foundations and trust structures. Otto initially disappeared to South Africa , but voluntarily returned to Germany in December 1989. After two years of pre-trial detention and after paying a bail of 500,000 DM, he was released. In February 1992, the fraud , infidelity , personal enrichment and accounting fraud trial began . Otto partially confessed. In June 1993 he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison by the Frankfurt jury court for breach of trust in three cases and violation of the duty of care, of which he served three years and five months in prison. Instead of two billion, the damage incurred was put at just twenty million marks. However, many events remained unresolved in the court proceedings.

Private

Otto is married and has two daughters. His vast fortune was partially transferred to his wife.

Media reception

Director Heinrich Breloer shot a docu-drama about the scandal in 1991 under the title colleague Otto - The Coop Affair ; When it was broadcast, the film, in which Otto is played by Rainer Hunold , attracted a lot of public attention. Otto published a book in 1996 with the title The co op scandal . A reviewer of the time described Otto as not very insightful and self-righteous; a FAZ reviewer wrote that the book was ultimately nothing but a justification.

A former press spokesman for the co op group, Armin Peter, published a novel about the common economy in 2014 . Experience from his work at the co op also flowed into this.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Bernd Otto . munzinger. Retrieved September 14, 2014.
2. ↑ “It was all just an aerial formation” , DER SPIEGEL 20/1989 of May 15, 1989, accessed on March 24, 2019
3. ^ Mismanagement at Coop. The almost perfect crime . manager magazine online. August 28, 2001. Retrieved September 14, 2014.
4. ↑ Bernd Otto (author), The Coop scandal: A lesson from the German economy. 1996, Campus Verlag . Archived from the original on December 28, 2016. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved December 28, 2016. 
5. ↑ colleague Otto in the Internet Movie Database (English)
6. ↑ Bernd Otto: The co op scandal. A lesson from the German economy. Campus Verlag 1996, ISBN 3-593-35584-1 .
7. ↑ Gunhild Freese: Zeit-online 38/1996 didactic piece without teaching . time online. September 13, 1996. Retrieved September 14, 2014.
8. ↑ FAZ of September 16, 1996, p. 16 / Georg Giersberg: Found in prison for freedom (review)
9. ^ Armin Peter: Community economy. The novel of should and is. 2014, ISBN 978-3-7357-1992-8 .