Jürgen Harksen

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Jürgen Smith (born as Jürgen Harksen on December 30, 1960 in Flensburg ) is a German convicted financial fraudster and author.

Life

Harksen was born the son of a salesman and a Danish hairdresser. He has two older brothers and a younger sister. He graduated from secondary school .

Harksen first worked as a bailiff's assistant. After moving to Hamburg in 1986 , in 1987 he switched to encouraging investors to participate in non-existent investment companies under the pretense of a return of up to 1300% . According to the pyramid scheme , he paid returns to the first small investors, so that wealthy Hanseatic people became aware of him. The singer Udo Lindenberg put 100,000 DM on him, but got doubts overnight and got his money back. Dieter Bohlen mentions Harksen in his biography and puts the lost sum at three million DM. However, Harksen denies this and confirms that he returned the money to Bohlen along with a severance payment of 600,000 marks. Bohlen never filed a criminal complaint against Harksen.

The judgment of the Hamburg Regional Court of April 11, 2003 determined that Harksen had fraudulently obtained a total of at least DM 150 million between 1987 and 1992 by pretending to have no real investments from around three hundred injured parties and, apart from repayments, of up to DM 50 million mostly consumed for its extremely luxurious lifestyle.

1993 fled Harksen with his family to Cape Town , South Africa to the creditors to escape and to avoid an impending arrest. From there, too, he acquired new potential investors and managed to put the old investors off by inviting them to Cape Town, celebrating lavish parties and introducing allegedly serious investors and auditors. An auditor certified that he had assets of at least DM 1 billion. Harksen then supported Harksen when he sought refuge in South Africa under pressure from his creditors; the district court of Hamburg (judgment of April 11, 2003, 620 KLs 8/99) sentenced him to 2 years imprisonment on probation for fraud and attempted thwarting of punishment . After years of legal disputes, South Africa extradited Harksen to Germany on October 30, 2002.

Until then, he had tried with unchanged energy to prevent the injured party from taking action against him and, moreover, knew how to drag out the extradition proceedings initiated at the end of 1993 with considerable expenditure of legal advisors. Because of the partial statute of limitations, but also because of a corresponding reservation by the South African authorities during delivery, he could ultimately only be prosecuted for damage of around DM 30 million that he had inflicted on three Hamburg investors. The Hamburg Regional Court imposed six years and nine months imprisonment for fraud in 52 cases.

At the beginning of 2005, Harksen was moved from the Fuhlsbüttel correctional facility to the open penal system of the Glasmoor correctional facility . From there he worked from September 2005 as a cook in a restaurant . In connection with the publication of his memoir How I took their money from the rich and their preprint in the Bild newspaper, he was moved back to the closed prison in February 2006 after an early parole was rejected by the Higher Regional Court in January 2006 . However, with the intervention of his legal advisor, he returned to the open prison the following day. After serving his sentence, he was released on February 12, 2008.

He lived in Hamburg for about a year with his second wife Claudia Smith, whose name he took on when they married, and his three sons, and then moved with them to Mallorca , where he was active in the wine trade .

In the 2007 documentary Die Hochstapler by Alexander Adolph , Harksen gave a detailed interview about his crimes. Dieter Wedel was inspired by the Harksen case for the two-part television film Gier , which was broadcast in January 2010. Ulrich Tukur plays the role of the impostor .

On September 8, 2015, Jürgen Smith was sentenced again by the Hamburg Regional Court for fraud (crime time 2010) to one year and 3 months' suspended prison sentence. Smith is said to have made good the damage of 121,000 euros . In 2016, Harksen was suspected of having organized a fraudster for a court case, who was supposed to cover the defendant there as a witness against payment of 200,000 euros with a false testimony.

literature

  • Jürgen Harksen and Ulf Mailänder: How I took their money from the rich: The career of an impostor . Scherz Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 3-502-15011-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Scammer Harksen sentenced to prison . Berlin newspaper . April 12, 2003.
  2. ↑ Frank Siering: FRAUD Wende at the Cape of Good Hope . Bild.de . February 25, 1995.
  3. ^ Harksen convict sentenced to prison . Faz.Net date = 2003-4-11.
  4. ↑ Frank Siering: FRAUD Wende at the Cape of Good Hope . Bild.de . February 25, 1995.
  5. ↑ Six years and nine months for Harksen . The world . April 12, 2003.
  6. ↑ Mark Bittner: The new love of Jürgen Harksen . Bild.de . February 3, 2009.
  7. ↑ Holger Weber: Millions fraudster Jürgen Harksen: ´Only my customers were greedy´ . Mallorca Newspaper . January 14, 2010.
  8. ↑ Anja Wieberneit: Millions fraudster Jürgen Harksen back in court . Bild.de . September 10, 2015.
  9. ↑ Martin Eimermacher: Did Harksen organize the wrong witness? . The world . 17th January 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Harksen, Jürgen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Smith, Jurgen
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German white collar criminal
DATE OF BIRTH December 30, 1960
PLACE OF BIRTH Flensburg