FRANKFURT (GERMANY), March 3. (dpa/EP) –
The Public Prosecutor’s Office in the German town of Frankfurt made a new record on Thursday at the headquarters of the German Football Federation (DFB) and in other places as part of an investigation into alleged embezzlement.
According to the prosecution, a former DFB representative established a service agreement with a communication agency and paid him 360,000 euros ($400,000), but everything indicates that it was actually “a fictitious contract”.
In addition to the DFB headquarters, there were searches in the offices of five companies and in the private offices of the former director of the federation in five German states. The names of those affected by this investigation were not made public and the prosecution also said that a member of the communication agency is suspected of complicity in embezzlement.
The news comes a week before the election of a new DFB president following the resignation of Fritz Keller last year. Already last year, the authorities searched the headquarters of the ‘adidas’ firm on suspicion of tax evasion, apparently in connection with its sponsorship of the German Football Federation.
There was also another case for alleged tax evasion related to the advertising of national team matches, with a registration with the DFB made in 2020 and in which prosecutors believed that the DFB avoided taxing €4.7 million.
However, last year the authorities finally closed the investigations into this matter against several DFB officials, including interim president Rainer Koch.