Manfred Schmider

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Manfred Schmider (born July 3, 1949 in Karlsruhe ) is a former German entrepreneur. He co-founded the in 2000 through fraud in insolvency previous company FlowTex . During the criminal investigation of the FlowTex scandal, he was sentenced to 11 ½ years ' imprisonment.

Ascent

Schmider attended elementary school in Karlsruhe and allegedly dropped out of economics . At the age of 16 he was already selling life insurance . After various other activities, he opened a used car and scrap dealership. According to his own statements, he was kidnapped in the mid-1980s and valuables and cash worth millions were stolen from his home. The insurance company paid two million DM in compensation. Despite an appeal on the television program Aktenzeichen XY unsolved , the case was never legally resolved at the time and finally filed. When the perpetrators came forward almost ten years later and accused Schmider of insurance fraud, the allegations of contradicting information did not lead to any charges.

In 1986 he acquired a license to manufacture mobile horizontal drilling machines from FlowMole in the USA . With these machines it is possible to lay pipes underground without digging a trench beforehand. That was the beginning of the company "FlowTex" in Ettlingen , which he founded together with his partner Klaus Kleiser in the same year. The FlowTex machines initially aroused interest and Schmider expanded his company into a group of companies with several thousand employees in just a few years. Flowtex invested considerable funds in public relations, which also benefited his personal fame. He appointed Jürgen Morlok , the former chairman of the FDP in Baden-Württemberg, as company spokesman. He was soon admired in public as a successful entrepreneur. Baden-Württemberg's Prime Minister Erwin Teufel praised FlowTex as a “gem” of the state economy. Lothar Späth gave the laudation on Schmider's 50th birthday. Due to his appearance and due to his success, he was nicknamed "Big Manni".

Schmider began to live on a large scale. He acquired a 60,000 square meter property on the exclusive Turmberg in Karlsruhe . He bought villas in Cannes , Miami , Ibiza and St. Moritz . He bought the 55 meter long Maalana from the Prince of Brunei for DM 20 million . He owned two private planes and a helicopter that he used to fly the 10 km to work. He was a generous host to business partners and politicians. He made several donations to the two parties CDU and FDP. In 1995 Schmider was awarded the contract to acquire the vacated Canadian air force base in Baden / Söllingen . He planned to build the airport Baden-Airpark there and to relocate commercial enterprises. A new FlowTex headquarters should also be built there. The state granted him a grant of 35 million DM for the conversion and the neighboring communities added another 22 million DM.

Decline

In the course of money laundering investigations by the Portuguese and Spanish authorities, the Federal Criminal Police Office became aware of Flowtex in 1999. The BKA then contacted the financial administration in Karlsruhe. After further internal research and inquiries was searched the premises on 4 February 2000 and Schmider and his partner Kleiser for absconding in custody taken. It turned out that its success was based on years of fraudulent business practice. Of the more than 3,400 machines on the balance sheet, only 220 actually existed. The rest were only available on paper. During inspection visits by lenders, the nameplates of the machines in the yard were quickly replaced beforehand. Through a sale-lease-back transaction within the group of companies, the company received sales for the only fictitious machines in order to cover the running costs and to meet the increasing obligations to creditors. Even the auditing company KPMG has not become suspicious over the years. Over time, the snowball-like Ponzi scheme was doomed to fail. The damage determined by the public prosecutor's office amounts to € 2.2 billion. On February 8, 2000, a creditor bank filed for insolvency against Flowtex Technologie GmbH & Co. KG. As later became known, a complaint was received by the authorities in 1996 with reference to the fraudulent business practices. At that time, however, this information was not followed up.

Legal processing

The Mannheim public prosecutor drew up the indictment. On December 18, 2001, Schmider was sentenced to twelve years imprisonment by the Mannheim district court as one of the main culprits. Because of a possible bias on the part of the judges, the Federal Court of Justice, as a revision instance, overturned the decision. The retrial in 2003 reduced the sentence by six months to 11 ½ years. Schmider tried a new revision of the verdict with the help of a psychological report. The expert attested him a " Harry Potter phenomenon of hallucinatory wish fulfillment", but he was fully responsible for the crimes. He then withdrew the appeal and the judgment became final. As of July 2006, he was granted the status of a free prisoner and on October 2, 2007 he was paroled.

The Flowtex scandal drew wider circles. A committee of inquiry of the Baden-Württemberg state parliament dealt with the topic from March 2002 to October 2005 and in particular with the relations to local and state politics. The final report presented u. a. firmly, “the files could not give any clues for a controlled, politically motivated preference for Manfred Schmider u. a. in terms of FlowTex. "

In 2013 Schmider was on trial again. The Mannheim district court accused him of the bankruptcy offense . In 2005 and 2006 he had four valuable Chagall paintings and an expensive SUV brought past the creditors to his wife in Switzerland via a former fellow prisoner . Schmider confessed to what was deemed mitigating and received a suspended sentence of one year and ten months.

The time after

Schmider lives today (as of June 2020) with his wife, who was divorced after 24 years of marriage, on Mallorca . The bankruptcy proceedings were officially ended on February 7, 2020. The scams were the template for a musical that came on stage in 2011 with the title Big Money . His life story was the subject of a television film on ARD in 2019 under the title Big Manni . The broadcast was accompanied by a documentation by Martina Treuter. The SWR's production is called Big Manni - Big Money. The real story of a billion dollar fraud.

Web links

Commons : Manfred Schmider  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Manfred Schmider . In: Who's who . Retrieved June 27, 2020.
  2. ↑ a b c Meinrad Heck: The Flowtex scandal: How politics and the tax authorities profited from a gigantic economic fraud for years . 2006. Retrieved June 28, 2020.
  3. ↑ Dirk Krampitz: Fraud billions without feeling guilty: "The world wants to be cheated" . May 2, 2019. Accessed June 27, 2020.
  4. ↑ a b Flowtex scandal: fraudsters with billions remain free . In: WirtschaftsWoche . January 23, 2013. Accessed June 27, 2020.
  5. ↑ Dirk Krampitz: Manfred Schmider speaks for the first time after fraud: "The world wants to be cheated". In: Focus Online . May 2, 2019, accessed July 1, 2020 .
  6. ↑ Frank Krause: Trial against the former FlowTex boss: The search for Big Manni's millions. In: stuttgarter-nachrichten.de. November 24, 2015, accessed July 1, 2020 .
  7. ↑ Meinrad Heck : The Flowtex scandal . 1st edition. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2006, ISBN 978-3-596-17080-7 , pp. 45 .
  8. ↑ a b FlowTex judgment: Twelve years imprisonment for Schmider. In: Spiegel Online . December 18, 2001, accessed July 1, 2020 .
  9. ↑ DPA, AP / AP / DPA: FlowTex creditors get nothing. In: stern.de . July 26, 2005, accessed July 1, 2020 .
  10. ^ A b Henryk Hielscher: Special drilling machine group: Flowtex insolvency proceedings ended. In: wiwo.de. February 20, 2020, accessed July 1, 2020 .
  11. ↑ FlowTex fraud is drawing wider circles. In: stern.de . August 6, 2001, accessed July 1, 2020 .
  12. ↑ a b Eleven years imprisonment for "Big Manni" . In: manager magazin . September 23, 2003. Retrieved June 29, 2020.
  13. ↑ Report and resolution recommendation of the committee of inquiry, page 845 . In: State Parliament of Baden-Württemberg . December 9, 2005. Retrieved June 29, 2020.
  14. ↑ Christoph Sackmann: "Big Manni": How Karlsruhe became a billionaire - with machines that never existed. In: Focus Online . June 29, 2020, accessed July 1, 2020 .
  15. ↑ Christian Buß: "Big Manni" on ARD via FlowTex: Big Money. Or maybe not. In: Spiegel Online . April 30, 2019, accessed July 1, 2020 .
  16. ↑ Swr: Big Manni - Big Money. In: swr.de. May 8, 2019, accessed July 1, 2020 .

Remarks

  1. ↑ The figures for the machines on the balance sheet and those manufactured are not always the same in the sources. However, the orders of magnitude are consistent.
personal data
SURNAME Schmider, Manfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German entrepreneur
DATE OF BIRTH July 3, 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH Karlsruhe