DThe public prosecutor’s office in Frankfurt/Main is investigating suspected infidelity against a former representative of the German Football Association. The authority announced this and confirmed house searches in the DFB headquarters, the private apartment of the former official and in the offices of five companies on Thursday.
First, the ZDF reported on the house searches. “A former representative of the DFB is said to have concluded a service contract with a communications agency on behalf of the DFB. Based on this contract, the DFB is said to have paid a total of 360,000 euros to the communications agency,” said the public prosecutor. “The contract is said to have been a mere sham contract.”
The authority did not name the former official. Because of the suspicion of aiding and abetting infidelity, a person responsible for the communications agency is also being investigated. A total of around 70 officers were involved in the searches in Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia, Baden-Württemberg, Berlin and Bremen.
This means that the DFB is once again in the focus of official investigations before its Bundestag in Bonn next Friday with the election of the new president. In November 2021, the public prosecutor’s office took documents from the headquarters of sponsor Adidas because of the allegation of tax evasion. According to media reports, it was about the taxation of benefits in kind from the long-standing DFB sponsor between 2015 and 2020.
In October 2020, in another case, the business premises of the DFB in Frankfurt’s Otto-Fleck-Schneise and the private apartments of several officials were searched by tax investigators. It was about the taxation of income from perimeter advertising at home games of the national team in 2014 and 2015. The DFB had escaped taxation of around 4.7 million euros, the investigators had announced at the time.
At the end of October this year, the public prosecutor’s office dropped the tax proceedings against the DFB interim boss Rainer Koch. The president of the Bavarian Football Association is also a member of the UEFA executive. Before that, the proceedings against the former DFB top officials Reinhard Rauball and Helmut Sandrock had already been discontinued. A total of six officials had been accused of involvement in tax evasion in particularly serious cases.
