From a portrait of attorney Hanno Berger, one of the masterminds of the $60 billion cum-ex heist, by someone who worked at his firm:
Sensitive types, Dr. Berger told his underlings [one] day, should find other jobs.
“Whoever has a problem with the fact that because of our work there are fewer kindergartens being built,” Dr. Berger reportedly said, “here’s the door.”
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A description of the world of cum-ex, German branch:
It was a realm beyond morality, [an insider] said: all male, supremely arrogant, and guided by the conviction that the German state is an enemy and German taxpayers are suckers.
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And wouldn’t you just know it’d be a fuckin fraulein that fucked it all up!
But in 2011, a clerk in the Bonn Federal Central Tax Office, who was interviewed by the German media team and has remained anonymous, came across tax refund applications that looked dubious. They were from a single American pension fund that had bought, then quickly sold, $7 billion in German stock. Now it wanted a tax refund of $60 million. The fund had just one beneficiary.
Instead of paying the refund, the clerk made inquiries. She soon received a peppery letter from a German law firm that threatened to hold her “PERSONALLY” accountable “under criminal, disciplinary and liability law.” The clerk reported all of this to prosecutors, which ultimately led to the trial in Bonn.
January 27th, 2020 at 12:20PM
I’ll note that the recent NYT article on the cum-ex affair did not make -any- attempt to explain how the thing worked. Scary.
January 27th, 2020 at 1:28PM
MattF: Yes, the (many) comments on the article note that actual description of the thing is missing. I guess it’s so simple that, if we knew, we’d all do it at home…