So shes in the median but several media reports mention a total of at least 55000000000. 00 euros. The highest of the century. Tax tricks cost authorities billions. The government is covering up its own failures. It may be the biggest tax scandal in german history for years a cascade of revenue flowed unhindered from state coffers exits just perfect to have become ex is the perfect crime it does for no and it didnt happen with a pistol and a schema but with a pinstripe suit and a tie not just. The hanks and investors took advantage of the law. There was never a loophole it was simply theft. The players big banks and super rich investors come to hold them to mostly i was able to help clarify a very complex issue of. What did the politicians know. Its cute when charm acts are the state failed blatantly house. Fallout from the scandal kept coming. Since i couldnt have imagined what would happen what we dont cover. In the end the main victim was the taxpayer but how did the finance sectors conjuring trick work was there a legal loophole or was it fraud pure and simple and who foots the bill for the billions most. September 2901. 00 of germanys biggest tax fraud trials was beginning the 1st criminal case resulting from the comex affair to british bankers went before the regional poor. In the city up on the central question were the comics deals criminal or was there a legal tax loophole. The fact that the trial took place at all is thanks in part to investigative journalist all of. His reporting brought the scandal to light in 2013 he was working for news magazine show down in hamburg. He took an anonymous phone call and what he heard brought him to what may well be the biggest story of his life. Is has at swords confirmed and i hated it tauriel meetings and so i was probably the only available reporter at stanton that say because everyone was in the meeting and the receptionist put a call through to me and the caller told me about come eggs and he was constrained to the piece i have to admit id never heard of come x. Before but when the person mentioned the names of several german investors large my ears pricked up because one of the investors was casten mushmouth. As well as entrepreneur carsten marsh meyer there was Meat Industry boss and shall go soccer Club Chairman clemens tanyas and drugstore king air of an mierda these mega rich germans are said to have poured millions into what were attractive investments with high returns all 3 say they didnt know they were involved in suspected come x. Transactions they later took action against the bank that allegedly invested their money in the dubious deals. Journalist all of us were and had tasted blood even at this early stage the story was incredible in switzerland he met with informants from the secretive banking world who passed on confidential documents to him the explosive leaks suggested that banks and. Esthers had cheated the german tax authorities out of millions of. Research basically showed that this wasnt tax evasion like someone hiding their money in panama or another offshore country to avoid paying taxes and this was essentially financed and somebody putting their head into the german state office when i finally understood that because i suddenly got a sense of the dimension of the whole story on infinite demand to be called. From began investigating major german consumer banks as well as employ enjoy european private banks he was entering a complex moral the system behind comics was deliberately designed to be opaque to outsiders especially tax authorities. In order to engage in a comics deal 1st you need some Company Stock on the stock market each shareholder gets an annual payment if the company has made a profit this distribution of profits is called a dividend. A share purchased before the socalled x. Date is referred to as come dividend that is it comes with a slice of the annual profit traded on or after that date the share is x. Dividend with no slice of the profit. Dividends are subject to Capital Gains tax and its this tax thats central to the comics trick. Put simply the process works like this. Lets say person a buys a share in a large car company at the end of the fiscal year that company pays out a dividend to a person and. This slice of the companys profit is subject to Capital Gains tax which the state automatically withholds. Person receives a certificate from their bank and under certain. Conditions can use it to reclaim the tax from the government. Thats the way things normally work on the stock market but how do come x. Transactions work out the Frankfurt Stock Exchange business journalist valerie holler regularly reports on complex Financial Issues heres her explanation. As i in fact as act put it simply comebacks shares were pushed back and forth between different investors so quickly the tax authorities no longer knew who actually owns them as a result the Capital Gains tax was refunded several times even though it was only paid once so the stage we funded more in taxes than it had collected and the investors got back more tax paid in the 1st place i think for have a hope its not. Imagine a worker paying tax on their income filing their tax return but then getting several tax rebates thats the principle behind comics to make sure nobody caught wind of their scheme the alleged perpetrators used to skillfully arrange networks how exactly back to the stock market again. Importantly they come back straight involve several traders but only one share right now person a has it. Then along comes person b. They buy a share of the same company very shortly before the x. Date the cut off date for dividends but person b. Doesnt buy the share from the company itself but from person c. Person c. Doesnt even own the share at this point this is called a short sale and its completely legal now comes the day of the dividend payout person a gets their profit minus the Capital Gains tax and a certificate with which they can get their money back from the state up to this point every. But heres the trick. In the whole confusion there was only one share person a sold it to person c. And person c. Has to deliver the share to person b. Because that sales already happened. Person b. Finally gets their share. And mistakenly they also get a certificate from their bank as if a real dividend had been paid just like with person a. And there you have it in the whole scheme theres only one share but 2 certificates the share is traded back and forth between parties a b. And c. So quickly that it 1st glance the state no longer knows who owns it and mistakenly to tax or to pick its our issue. So to investors get a tax refund from the state even though only one of them actually paid taxes the profit is then shared by all 3 parties. Thats the general structure which shady investors have built up into towering profits because what works on a small scale can work on a large scale to single shares are said to have been pushed back and forth up to 12 times comebacks became a real industry one that all of our reporting began to shed light on. With his investigation the journalist unleashed a tidal wave in the banking world one that would eventually threaten to engulf him as well he had no idea how big it would be or what scandals were lurking beneath the surface. An hours drive from berlin is the small city of in the state of brandenburg. Among the 26000. 00 inhabitants theres little sign of the hustle one bustle of the nearby german capital what do regular taxpayers think about comics. This is terrible its totally exasperating i also think the state is too passive about it it should put more energy into these things to egypt and i took the simple how could this have been going on for so many years given that so many of our lawmakers have Legal Training it was fairly close. Where those well trained politicians do their work until the end of 28 Team Hardship was one of them since leaving politics the former green Party Parliamentarian has been fighting for a more transparent Financial System previously as a member of the bundestag he fought for the prosecution of suspected comebacks perpetrators of. The indignity ted said on the one hand there are those who actually carried out these traces on the actual Share Transactions on the Financial Market the investment bankers. There also had to be tax lawyers to examine everything. For these were often Tax Consultants who came from outside the banks or funds so there had to be consultants and people who set up these structures in the 1st choice of a whole group of people had to be in it together. And its all the more frightening that they managed to keep it hidden for such a long time. Several 100 people are said to have been involved experts estimate 400 participants all of whom acted without scruples. It isnt a horse and for in the financial world there are people whose greed knows no bounds is cited have to very actively prevent them from robbing you. And these people must be stopped these are large muslim stock. One such person may well be the 68 year old once worked as a tax official for the german state then he switched to the private sector starting his own tax consultancy. In december 29 teams frankfurts general Prosecutors Office took to court hes accused of having developed comebacks as a Business Model for private clients thereby committing serious tax evasion. In response to our email inquiry farragher wrote the accusations of the frankfurt prosecutor are wholly unjustified in fact theyre absurd december 2900. 2012 a total of at least 10000000000. 00 euros are believed to have been lost to germany through comic straits. Thats money that could have been spent on hiring 160000. 00 additional teachers. Or buying school meals for every school child in germany for more than a year and a half. For funding the ministry of Family Affairs for a year. March 24th teen hamburg almost 4 months after the phone call from switzerland all official him and his colleagues were still investigating comics evaluating mountains of confidential documents by the end of march they finally had enough evidence they went public with the scandal their focus was on multimillionaire celebrities and influential swiss banks from knew what he was getting into but what happened next was a complete surprise. I learned weeks or months later that theyd taken a different kind of action the Swiss Private Banks are as enough which was involved in this come ex deal at the expense of the german treasury. Filed a complaint against me among others. Or and desiring a public Prosecutors Office started an investigation against me the Public Prosecutor didnt take action against the bank and the investors they took action against the person who made the fraud public namely me as a journalist these and. That is. This the allegation was that from had incited Bank Employees to hand over confidential information according to the media the Swiss Private Bank sara zene was one of the players in the comics scandal among the clients was german entrepreneur carsten mush mire from found himself targeted by the bank. Hit the nearest. Said but it wasnt until months later that i received documents from whistleblowers again and there it was in a black and white on the bank had hired 2 detective agencies to put me under surveillance. And the banks paid a lot to do it close to 100000. 00 english pounds shipped food so they were going to Great Lengths to find out. Or more with the because. The story gets even more complicated of all people one of sarahs own clients managed to take the high flying Financial Institution to court drugstore king air when. The german billionaire invested almost 50000000 euros in comics trades unknowingly according to him miller says the bank misused his money he hired a stuttgart law firm for the case millers lawyer. Says his client was a victim of the bank. The reason was that my client invested in the supposedly secure Financial Model on the recommendation of the thorazine bank. Comics risk double tax refunds. Ever came up. In the trial against sarah xen the parties contradicted each other. But millers lawyer got some unexpected help from inside the bank. A long Time Employee passed on internal documents that helped a cut side win the case for miller. The sara zene informant wants to stay anonymous but is willing to talk to us about what he witnessed at the bank. I saw that the bank wanted to sell and had already sold a Financial Product clearly designed to defraud german tanks authorities when customers bought the product they were told that what they were buying was completely on the level and legal according to the informant the product originated with mr comics himself berger confronted with the accusations berger told us by email that he only advised a few clients regarding comex and no banks but the former sara xen employee says otherwise he claims he tried to raise the alarm about burger numerous times at one point i was told very clearly that my reservations were misplaced that dr baird i was an expert in german tax law my boss told me several times that baerga had excellent networks in germany right up to the highest levels of government in berlin i was told he knew what he was doing and that we should just trust him. And it wasnt just happening in switzerland some large german Financial Institutions were also caught up in the scandal none of them more willing to answer our questions about comics on camera but we did get some written responses. To the frankfurt public Prosecutors Office is investigating in connection with shared transactions of comets and the former dress that our band performed over the dividend record date socalled come x. Transactions coming out sponsors cooperating fully with the authorities. Has cooperated and continues to cooperate with Public Prosecutors investigating criminal offenses regarding possible tax evasion in connection with the age b. B. S. Comics transactions which affect both bank itself and a former customer. Did not participate in organized comics trades either as a short seller or as comics purchaser however the bank was involved in comics transactions of customers. We did not receive a statement from swiss banks are a seen. As all of their trying to gain insight into the secretive financial world he came across an important witness. As part of our investigation we had an insider. And. He came clean in an interview with us he also described to me here in frankfurt in the high rise building where his office was. Bigger told the group if anyone here has a problem with the fact that what were doing prevents kindergartens and schools and roads from being renovated they should please get up and leave you know that no one left the meeting room and i mean they didnt know the meaning of the word morality. More to condemn it. When we asked him about these alleged statements response was to say that a lawyer only represents his clients interests and doesnt work for the state worse few of. Them do why didnt come x. Traitors seem to care where the money came from was it arrogance or ignorance. Hamburg business psychologist eva short to alstom knows about the secretive circles of bankers bank of a bank to see their role as 1st and foremost to increase their customers investment or at least not to let it decrease and given that they consider it absolutely fair and legitimate to evade taxes in order to save their customers money. The more their customers invested the more the suspected comebacks perpetrators made in commissions that meant big money now to one of them bought a yacht which he supposedly named come ex ups and throw in there was a broker who had 2 villains on milkha one in the north and one in the south when he was asked why he said theres a 2 degree temperature difference here in winter i mean the one thats a bit warmer and in summer i mean the cooler one though but he didnt die in an these are the kinds of a 1st World Problems that come to traitors faces they dont even know what to do with their money and we need. The high life at the taxpayers expense thanks to the state rebates comics participants remained in their wealth bubble far from the reality most of us know. Journalists like all of us were stirring up a lot of dirt as they investigated the story and things were about to get even dirtier. Back to berlin an important place in the comic saga germanys political establishment has come in for heavy criticism over its handling of the scandal. When you meant this how was if someone leaves the door of the house open so these can wander in and out and theyre partly responsible if there is a burglary of a stolen goods with come x. The state feel blatantly discuss it has to be dealt with people need to take political responsibility but. The 1st signs of that failure came early on in 1992 an official in the Economy Ministry of the state of has reported the 1st comics transactions but 10 years passed and nothing happened. By 2002 at the latest the German Government was aware of comics the association of german banks sent a letter to the finance ministry drawing attention to comics deals. At the time the finance minister was hans i should of the center left social democrats hes the only former finance minister to agree to an interview he wasnt at the helm during the peak of comics deals but his term did cover the arrival of the banking associations letter. Jobber you invites to my not side as finance minister i never heard anything about this topic during my time as finance minister if stuff recently though there was a letter which i later saw from the association of german banks to the finance ministry on a clerical level even though a matter stated clerical often there is a hold. At the time it seemed to be it was really technical tax issues and not anything that had to do with large revenues or revenue losses to the state a