FRANKFURT (GERMANY), 15 Apr. (dpa/EP) –
The honorary president of Bayern Munich, Uli Hoeness, claimed this Monday that he did not know anything about the purpose of an alleged payment from the French businessman Robert Louis-Dreyfus to the late Franz Beckenbauer and whose purpose was to buy the 2006 World Cup for Germany.
“I don’t know what the money was for,” Hoeness declared on the fourth day of a tax evasion trial against former senior German soccer officials where he ruled out that the money was used to buy votes to award Germany the 2006 World Cup. “The “FIFA was a quite corrupt group at that time, they could even think about buying a World Cup, but I am still convinced that the German Football Federation (DFB) and Germany did not do it,” he said.
In the trial, former DFB presidents Wolfgang Niersbach and Theo Zwanziger, as well as former DFB secretary general Horst R. Schmidt, are accused of tax evasion for having declared a payment as operating expenses, although they all reject this accusation.
The charges center on 6.7 million euros ($7.13 million) that the DFB transferred through world soccer’s governing body, FIFA, to the late businessman Robert Louis-Dreyfus. The money was declared as payment for a World Cup gala that was never held.
Legendary former player Franz Beckenbauer, head of the 2006 World Cup organizing committee, had received a loan for the same amount from Louis-Dreyfus in 2002, and that money ended up in an account owned by the now disgraced former top FIFA official, the Qatari Mohammed bin Hammam. It is not clear what the money was used for.
Beckenbauer denied having ever received a personal loan from Louis-Dreyfus during an interrogation by the prosecution in 2016. “I did not sign any promissory note,” Beckenbauer said then, according to the transcript of the hearing, read this Monday.
As stated by the ‘Kaiser’ in 2016, the money had been paid to FIFA as a kind of commission to receive a subsidy of 250 million Swiss francs (273.38 million dollars) from the world football governing body for the World Cup. Germany 2006. “I had no knowledge of the payment process,” said Beckenbauer, who did admit that he gave “many blank signatures.”
In this sense, Hoeness stated that, despite his friendship with Beckenbauer and Louis-Dreyfus, he never spoke to any of them about the events. “I’m only curious when it comes to Bayern or myself. I didn’t ask what the money was for, it was a taboo subject,” he said.