16 trial days have been scheduled for the proceedings surrounding the Summer Fairy Tale affair against former leading DFB officials before the Frankfurt Regional Court. This emerges from a press release from the authority.
The ex-presidents of the German Football Association, Wolfgang Niersbach and Theo Zwanziger, as well as the former general secretary Horst R. Schmidt are accused of tax evasion.
As already announced, the trial will begin on March 4th next year. The last day of the trial would be July 11th. This means that the process runs right into the middle of the home European Championship (June 14th to July 14th).
So far, there has been poor processing of the events
In May, the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court restarted the proceedings against the trio that had previously been discontinued by the regional court at the end of October 2022. The Higher Regional Court announced at the time that the district court’s dismissal decision had been revoked and the proceedings had to be continued.
As things stand, the current lack of processing of the events surrounding the 2006 World Cup in Germany will result in legal repercussions in a German court. Zwanziger, Niersbach and Schmidt had always rejected all allegations.
The regional court discontinued the proceedings on October 27 last year due to the prohibition of double jeopardy, after proceedings in Switzerland had previously been discontinued due to the statute of limitations.
Essentially, it was about a payment of 6.7 million euros from the DFB via the world association FIFA to the now deceased entrepreneur Robert Louis-Dreyfus. The money was declared as a contribution to a gala for the 2006 World Cup that never took place. In 2002, Franz Beckenbauer, in his role as World Cup organizer, received a loan of the same amount from Louis-Dreyfus, which ultimately disappeared into the accounts of the former FIFA finance official Mohamed bin Hammam.