Passport forgery scandal
The passport forgery scandal was a scandal involving foreign ice hockey players with forged German passports , which was uncovered in the 1980/81 season of the ice hockey Bundesliga .
prehistory
As early as the mid-1970s, the clubs of the ice hockey Bundesliga had increasingly reinforced themselves with foreigners. This fact, in connection with the increase in artificial ice rinks in Germany, had eliminated the climate-related location advantage of the Bavarian clubs, whose dominance ended.
With the increasing competition in the league, the transfer fees and annual fees rose sharply. Clubs like SB Rosenheim and Krefelder EV had already gone bankrupt . Other clubs tried to finance their players in other ways.
In order to keep salaries low, the clubs increasingly used abroad. This development got out of hand, however, so that the number of foreigners per team and per game was limited by the German Ice Hockey Federation .
In order to circumvent this regulation and to set up an inexpensive team suitable for the Bundesliga, the coach of the Mannheim ERC , Heinz Weisenbach , decided to take a new path. Weisenbach flew to Toronto to find players of German origin who could play as Germans in the Bundesliga. The coach spent six weeks overseas and brought a total of twelve players and numerous contacts with him. The MERC later signed six of the players, including Harold Kreis , Manfred Wolf , Roy Roedger and Peter Ascherl . The other clubs then tried to circumvent this regulation as well by locating German-born players abroad, especially in Canada and the United States , and giving them German citizenship , which was favored because of their German ancestry. Overall, the clubs in the first and second division filled their squads with 77 players from North America.
Effects
The North American players significantly increased the playing strength in the Bundesliga. When the reservoir for such players was exhausted, some clubs resorted to illegal methods by obliging North American players with forged German passports. Whether the clubs concerned, as they sometimes claimed, had nothing to do with the forged passports, or whether they only knew about it and then tolerated it, or whether they were actively involved in the forgeries, could never be conclusively clarified. However, they used players who were not eligible to play and who had received their eligibility under false conditions.
In May 1980 the German Consulate General in Edmonton had informed the DEB of inconsistencies in the allocation of passes to ice hockey players. A total of around 60 players were suspected of having obtained German citizenship by fraud. In response, the DEB forwarded the passports in question to the Foreign Office for verification .
Exposure of the scandal
After the audit, it became known that the game permits for a total of 19 players were not allowed. Two Bundesliga teams in particular were affected by this scandal, on the one hand Duisburger SC and on the other hand Cologne EC .
Five of the 19 players affected were under contract with Duisburger SC. So that the championship round could continue, the DEB officials decided to subsidize the Duisburgers, who were close to bankruptcy, with 5,000 marks for every away game . A little later, the Duisburg manager Fritz Hesselmann admitted the forged passports and resigned from his position. As a result, some DEB patrons refused to reward the fraud afterwards. This meant that the Rhinelander failed to play two games.
In February 1981 the DEB sports court ruled on the punishments for the two teams from Duisburg and Cologne. For both clubs, all games involving players with forged passports were rated as lost with 0: 2 points and 0: 5 goals, and the points were awarded to the respective opponents. The arbitration award on the point deduction had been made after the end of the first round of the play-offs , in which Cologne had also participated. So the round had to be repeated completely without Cologne participation, because EV Füssen moved up instead . Likewise, the relegation round began again, in which the Cologne now participated.
In the end, 17 points were deducted from the Duisburger SC, which meant safe relegation, because after the entry into force of the player bans the decimated club could only book one victory in the preliminary round and ended the season with two points on the credit side. The Cologne EC had already reacted to the suspensions in the middle of the season by dismissing the suspected players. Nevertheless, the 20 points were also deducted from Cologne. The Cologne EC rose from a place in the table among the top three in the relegation round and later managed to stay in the class in the relegation round. Even the EV Landshut some points had been removed, after which the club's president and chairman of the league committee Rudolf Gandorfer resigned. The other teams that had used players who were not eligible to play remained unpunished because their officials had not been proven to have forged.