News from the German WeRe front, the first chickens came home to roost - a German WeRe member was
sentenced for two cases of attempted fraud (1.Instance) to a fine of 1.500 Euro plus costs of proceedings (he says his own lawyer alone has cost him around 1.000 Euro so far). The report (the first sentenced case I know of) comes from the member himself on the German Were forum (member only, I can't post the link, I made a screenshot so nobody can claim I made it up).
Screenshot
He posted (and I translated) a transcript of the verbal sentencing (written up by one of the 15 "observer" he brought to the hearing) and not the written sentence. Especially the question if a WeRe member is a victim or a perpetrator was of great interest in all fraud considerations lately, and this subject was clarified here.
The defendant is guilty of attempted fraud in 2 cases (1 LLT of 6.800 Euro to pay income tax at the tax office, 1 LLT over 3.600 Euro to pay commercial tax at the city bank) and is sentenced to a fine of 50 times 30 Euro of daily rate. The defendant has to pay the costs of the proceedings.
Well, if the repeal is rejected the whole adventure will cost him around 4.000 Euros then, but don't worry, he earlier claims in the post that he has sent oppt bills to the tax office, I am sure they pay for this.
Reasons:
A lot is based on the defendants own statement. There is no doubt that he has submitted those checks and that he tried that to pay off his debt and therefore achieve an economic advantage for himself. Does this bank exist or not ... that doesn't really matter, I believe. Because from his own statement it is objectively clear that this bank or this institute does not create actual value and if I know, I send a formless letter and a promissory note of 150.000 Euro without any collateral, without any notarial authentication to a foreign country, to some address that I found on the internet, and they give me checks or bills of exchange or bonds or something ... simply by that statement I can tell that this institute is not suitable in any way to pay a debt. And this makes it already clear, supported by the statements of the witnesses (2 senior employees of the city bank and one case worker from the tax office) that clarified their research has revealed that there is no asset value behind it. That there is something like a promissory note is not in dispute, but there has to be some assets behind it to support it when passed on by the bank.
A simple, common sense explanation, but my hope is that when this goes into appeal we should get a more detailed explanation from the second instance sentence (which should then also be publicly available). Will it convince WeRe members? Probably not.
To the subjective requirements: I don't think the defendant is a victim here, even he himself doesn't see it that way, I rather believe that he has been obsessed by a political and ideological view that obfuscated a clearer view of things, maybe as a result of a personal and economic crises, as we have incidentally learned during this hearing ... that he, who is himself working within the financial services sector, does not realize that such a model does not correspond with the actual economical reality, there I find it very difficult to say he hasn't known, he didn't do it on purpose.
He himself sees this, too, and I think its more of a political, ideological background, and everybody is of course allowed to have that, but that doesn't mean one is allowed by that to defraud people of their money, in this case the citizens of Ravensburg, and that has happened here and for that the defendant has to be sentenced.
Hard to say if this will stand up as reasoning in other cases (the guy works in financial services - holy shit), but, again, an appeal might clarify the issue more decisively.
The rest of the sentencing is the determination of the amount, the daily rate based on estimating his available income at around 900 Euro, and the amount of "days" based on the consideration that the two cases (which would result in 30 plus 40) happened within two days and were considered linked, reducing the amount to 50 "days", 30 Euros each.
He made clear that he will appeal the sentence - and then he begged the other WeRe members for money (through Paypal), because the lawyer wants to be paid (around 1000 Euro, as mentioned, and probably another 1000 for the appeal).
