Karlheinz Schreiber

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Karlheinz Schreiber (born March 25, 1934 in Petersdorf near Nordhausen ) is a German businessman . As a former arms lobbyist, he was involved in several political affairs and is considered one of the key figures in the CDU donation affair around Helmut Kohl and Wolfgang Schäuble and in the trial against Max Strauss . In May 2010, the Augsburg Regional Court sentenced Schreiber to eight years in prison for tax evasion . However, an appeal initiated by both the defense and the public prosecutor's office was approved by the Federal Court of Justice, so that further negotiations took place. On November 14, 2013, he was sentenced to six and a half years in prison. In March 2016, the Munich Higher Regional Court suspended half of them on probation.

Life

Schreiber is the son of an upholsterer and grew up in Hohegeiß ( district of Blankenburg in what was then the Free State of Braunschweig ) in the Harz Mountains . After the end of the war, after graduating from school, he completed an apprenticeship as a salesman in a Braunschweig textile company. After moving to Munich, Schreiber became managing director of a carpet company and later took over a road marking company. He made contact with Franz Josef Strauss , whose confidante he became, through the CSU's economic advisory board. Schreiber was a member of the CSU until November 5, 2003 .

Schreiber began arranging orders for helicopters, Airbus aircraft and the Fuchs armored vehicle , and established connections between Thyssen and the Bavarian State Chancellery . He is also said to have had contacts with the Federal Intelligence Service . In the 1980s he received a commission of around 15 million euros from Thyssen for armaments projects . According to charges by the Augsburg public prosecutor's office , he distributed the money he received for the sale of Airbus machines and Fuchs tanks in the 1980s and early 1990s to industrialists, civil servants and politicians via clandestine accounts and letterbox companies. Among other things, Schreiber promoted sales of tanks to Saudi Arabia and aircraft to Thailand and Canada .

Schreiber is married and has two children. According to research, relatives now live in Buchholz near Nordhausen, Heringen / Helme, Nordhausen and Kirchseeon near Munich. Since he fled to Canada, however, there has been no contact with his family in Germany. In Canada, Schreiber developed a pressure cooker for noodles.

Maxwell affair

Schreiber was a prominent CSU member for many years, due to his special long-term trusting relationship with Franz Josef Strauss and his closeness to the Strauss family. In the family business FMS Investments Ltd. (Franz and Marianne Strauss) was Schreiber until 1996 together with Max Strauss as director. A preliminary investigation was opened against Schreiber, as a result of which his house in Kaufering was searched. After the death of their parents, Monika Hohlmeier and Franz Georg Strauss were the owners of the company. In his diary, which has been published several times in excerpts, not only sums of money but also the recipients identified by code names (presumably eg "Maxwell" for Max Strauss) and the names of other local personalities such as B. of the former District Administrator ( Landkreis Landsberg ) and District Assembly President ( District Assembly of Upper Bavaria ) Erwin Filser and others.

CDU donation affair

Among other things, the former CDU treasurer Walther Leisler Kiep received one million D-Marks from Schreiber in Switzerland, which flowed into the CDU party coffers. Kiep, two Thyssen managers - Jürgen Maßmann and Winfried Haastert - and the then Secretary of State for Armaments Ludwig-Holger Pfahls were convicted of bribery.

One of the things that attracted attention was the fact that Wolfgang Schäuble received 100,000 DM (the equivalent of around 51,000 euros) from Schreiber. The whereabouts of this payment could not be clarified until today. Further donations could in part be legalized by the CSU afterwards.

In addition, Schreiber bribed State Secretary Ludwig-Holger Pfahls with 3.8 million D-Marks (the equivalent of around 1.9 million euros) in order to enable the quick delivery of “ Fuchs ” tanks to Saudi Arabia . Pfahls was on the run from 1999 to July 2004 when he was finally arrested in Paris . After the extensive confession in August 2005 after a trade with the public prosecutor's office, the Augsburg Regional Court sentenced him to 2 years and 3 months in prison for taking advantage and tax evasion .

Escape to Canada

In October 1995, after a house search, Schreiber moved from his home town of Kaufering to Pontresina , Switzerland. In September 1997, the Augsburg District Court issued an arrest warrant on suspicion of tax evasion.

Schreiber, who has both German and Canadian citizenship, fled to Ottawa in Canada in 1999 and was wanted by an international arrest warrant . On August 31, 1999, he was caught in Toronto and the German judiciary applied for his extradition . Schreiber was released on September 8, 1999 on bail of 1.2 million Canadian dollars (740,000 euros). The bail was provided by Schreiber's wife Barbara, a Mövenpick manager, as well as former Canadian Treasury Secretary Marc Lalonde and Elmar MacKay, a confidante of former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney . On March 9, 2000, the Augsburg Public Prosecutor brought charges against Schreiber for bribery , aiding and abetting embezzlement , community fraud and tax evasion . However, Schreiber refused to appear in court in Augsburg without an assurance of safe conduct .

Since 1999, Schreiber has used legal means to fight against the threat of extradition. On March 8, 2006, Toronto's Ontario Supreme Court of Appeals announced that Schreiber's appeal against the Canadian Justice Department's October 2004 extradition decision had been denied. Schreiber's lawyer announced after the decision that the case would be brought to the Supreme Court of Canada , comparable to the German Federal Court of Justice . However, the constitutional complaint filed by three Americans against Canada's extradition law was dismissed in July 2006. Schreiber's legal possibilities to evade extradition to the Federal Republic of Germany were thus practically exhausted.

On July 8, 2005, the Federal Council decided to tighten the statute of limitations (“Lex Schreiber”), which suspends the statute of limitations for criminal offenses as long as the accused is abroad and the German authorities are extraditing them.

At the beginning of February 2007, Schreiber was in Canadian extradition custody. According to information from the Augsburger Allgemeine , Schreiber has now been released. The highest appeals court in the Canadian province of Ontario released him on February 8, 2007 from extradition custody; However, in early May 2007, he was arrested again. On May 10, 2007 Schreiber's appeal against extradition to the appeals court failed.

Investigative Committee against Mulroney

On March 24, 2007, in the course of his involvement in the so-called " Airbus Affair ", he brought a lawsuit at the Supreme Court of the Canadian province of Ontario against Brian Mulroney , the former Conservative Prime Minister of Canada, for breach of contract . He alleged that Mulroney had promised him between 1993 and 1994 that he would provide financial and political aid in exchange for CAD 300,000 to build an armored personnel carrier in Quebec . Mulroney is said not to have granted this help.

His extradition lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge in Halifax on June 11, 2007. At that time, his only legal remedy was an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, which was initially rejected in October 2007.

On November 5, 2007, Schreiber filed a statement with the Ontario Supreme Court through his attorney Edward Greenspan. The statement contained several allegations, including: a. that Mulroney was still in office when he signed the treaty and that the current Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper is said to have received a letter from Schreiber through Mulroney. These statements caused a great stir in the media. Harper set up a committee of inquiry, promised to cooperate and forbade contact between members of the faction meeting and Mulroney during the investigation. On November 13, 2007, Harper set up an independent commission of inquiry after Mulroney personally requested it.

On November 15, 2007, Schreiber's application to have the extradition warrant lifted failed. The Canadian Justice Minister Rob Nicholson assured a postponement until December 1st. Schreiber had one last chance to challenge the extradition order to the Supreme Court, if the court accepted his request at all. On November 30, 2007, the Ontario Provincial Court of Appeals granted Schreiber an additional period in which to retry his deportation to Germany before the Supreme Court. On December 4, 2007, the Ontario Province Appeals Court ruled that Schreiber should be released for the time being on bail of 1.3 million Canadian dollars.

In April 2009, Schreiber testified before the Canadian committee of inquiry under oath that he passed 500,000 Canadian dollars to the SPD in 1988 through the Thyssen manager Winfried Haastert, who was later convicted in Germany , but had no receipt for it. Schreiber also threatened several times with further revelations, in particular towards the Union parties in the event of his extradition.

Extradition and sentencing

At the beginning of July 2009, Schreiber failed for the fourth time in a court in Ontario with his plan to appeal against the extradition decision from 2004. This meant that he was not entitled to a new judicial review of his extradition. Until July 31, 2009, Schreiber appeared in Canada as a key witness in the investigation against Brian Mulroney.

3 August 2009 Schreiber was extradited to Germany and in the prison Augsburg in custody taken. On September 5, 2009, the presiding judge opened a new arrest warrant for him. Schreiber was only accused of tax evasion and aiding and abetting fraud. There was no longer any question of bribery and aiding and abetting of infidelity. The trial began on January 18, 2010 before the Augsburg regional court .

On May 5, 2010, he was sentenced to eight years in prison for tax evasion . The court saw it as proven that between 1988 and 1993 Schreiber smuggled the equivalent of 7.3 million euros through a system of bogus accounts and bogus companies in the tax authorities. During this time he received around 32 million euros in commissions from arms and aircraft deals. The presiding judge Rudolf Weigell criticized Schreiber in his reasoning for his judgment because of his business conduct and the lack of insight into guilt. He went on to say that "the system of concealment makes this case very different from other tax evasion cases" and only the advanced age and previous impunity would save him from an even longer prison sentence. The defense announced that they would challenge the judgment before the Federal Court of Justice. In addition, the public prosecutor's office appealed against the judgment of the Augsburg Regional Court, since the Regional Court had only convicted of tax evasion, but not also of bribery and aiding and abetting embezzlement. The Federal Court of Justice granted both appeals due to legal errors in September 2011 and referred the case back to the Augsburg Regional Court for re-trial.

Health complaints and release

After Schreiber suffered a heart attack, a few weeks later, on May 15, 2012, the Augsburg Regional Court suspended his arrest warrant under strict conditions. A complaint filed by the Augsburg public prosecutor's office was rejected as unfounded by the Munich Higher Regional Court on May 18 . Schreiber could now be released from custody after depositing a security deposit of 100,000 euros and his personal documents, which also happened on May 21, 2012.

Schreiber was initially under house arrest, after the second trial this was lifted and he continued to live in his house in Kaufering . In March 2016, the Munich Higher Regional Court decided, taking into account Schreiber's time in pre-trial detention and the psychological stress caused by two decades of investigative and criminal proceedings, to suspend the remaining period of detention.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Schreiber has to go to prison - six and a half years imprisonment for ex-gun lobbyist ( memento from November 17, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) br.de on November 14, 2013, deleted .. June 9, 2016
  2. ↑ Andreas Förster: The Amigo and the Mice. ( Memento from January 28, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) In: Frankfurter Rundschau , January 18, 2010.
  3. ^ Editing of Neues Deutschland: Karlheinz Schreiber, Nudelkocher (Neues Deutschland). Retrieved March 25, 2020 .
  4. ↑ “On the evening of January 10th, ARD changed its program at short notice. The CDU chairman Schäuble should 'show your colors'. Completely surprising, he announced that he had received a cash donation from Schreiber in the amount of 100,000 marks in 1994, which was not recorded in the CDU's statement of accounts at the time. He claims to have received the money personally from Schreiber the day after a donation dinner and then passed it on to Baumeister. He later said that he himself acted "100 percent correctly. Ms. Baumeister clearly made a mistake". “ The ominous Schreiber donation: A 100,000 mark question. In: Spiegel Online. August 2, 2001, accessed January 16, 2014 .
  5. ^ Announcement of the annual reports of the political parties for the calendar year 1999 (1st part - Bundestag parties). In: bundestag.de , December 15, 2000, (PDF, Page 184; 1.7 MB).
  6. ^ Alone against Kohl, Kiep & Co, Ch. Links Verlag, 2000 (online) , (p. 135).
  7. ↑ Schreiber fails again in court In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , October 4, 2007.
  8. ↑ Karlheinz Schreiber is defeated in the fight against extradition ( Memento from June 20, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) In: AFP via Google News , November 16, 2007.
  9. ↑ Financial Times Deutschland : Clerk before release on bail ( Memento from June 19, 2010 in the Internet Archive ), December 4, 2007
  10. ↑ Schreiber incriminates the SPD. In: Spiegel Online , August 8, 2009.
  11. ↑ Sebastian Fischer: Union defies the writer showdown. In: Spiegel Online , August 3, 2009.
  12. ↑ cf. Gun lobbyist Schreiber soon in Germany? ( Memento from July 15, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) at tagesschau.de, July 11, 2009
  13. ^ Eight years imprisonment for arms lobbyist Schreiber. In: Reuters , May 5, 2010.
  14. ^ Long prison sentence for writers at ntv.de, May 5, 2010
  15. ↑ The writer process is restarted. ( Memento of October 19, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) In: Financial Times Deutschland , September 6, 2011 (accessed on September 6, 2011).
  16. ↑ The Karlheinz Schreiber case - a never-ending story? In: Rechtslupe , September 6, 2011 (accessed September 6, 2011).
  17. ↑ Karlheinz Schreiber can be released from prison. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , May 18, 2012 (accessed June 9, 2016).
  18. ↑ Ex-gun lobbyist: The verdict against Schreiber is final . Spiegel, August 16, 2015
  19. ↑ The court spared Karlheinz Schreiber . March 21, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Schreiber, Karlheinz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German arms dealer
DATE OF BIRTH March 25, 1934
PLACE OF BIRTH Petersdorf (Thuringia)