Germany’s leading Cum-ex investigator, Senior Prosecutor Anne Brorhilker, is leaving the Cologne Public Prosecutor’s Office (thus relinquishing her civil service status) to become the Managing Director of the non-governmental organization Finanzwende, in order to continue her fight against financial crime.
Yesterday it was announced that Germany’s leading Cum-ex investigator, Senior Prosecutor Anne Brorhilker, has resigned and is leaving the Cologne Public Prosecutor’s Office (thus relinquishing her civil service status). She will now serve as the Managing Director of the non-governmental organization Finanzwende, in order to continue her fight against financial crime.
“At present, the 50-year-old jurist still heads Department H of the prosecuting authority, where, alongside Brorhilker, more than 30 prosecutors are investigating dozens of complex cases involving over 1700 accused individuals at home and abroad. (…) The investigations into the stock trading deals, through which banks, investors, and short sellers defrauded the German treasury of at least 10 billion euros between 2006 and 2012, are largely attributed to Brorhilker’s work,” as reported by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. According to other estimates, the state has lost around 12 billion euros due to Cum-ex transactions.
Brorhilker stated on WDR: “I have always been a prosecutor with heart and soul, especially in the field of economic crime, but I am not at all satisfied with how financial crime is prosecuted in Germany.”
Her work faced opposition, especially last autumn, when her top superior, NRW Justice Minister Limbach, wanted to split Brorhilker’s Department H, thereby transferring numerous Cum-ex investigations to another prosecutor’s responsibility. Brorhilker fought back internally within the judiciary, and the minister had to withdraw his plan.
Even eleven years after the first Cum-ex cases became known, politics still has not responded adequately, Brorhilker said in the WDR interview. Even today, there are tax thefts that unfold similarly to Cum-ex deals. According to ZEIT ONLINE, she criticizes the lenient treatment of perpetrators, particularly in Germany. In Germany, there is the “fundamental problem that perpetrators with a lot of money and influence encounter a weak judiciary that cannot handle it.” This leads to the finding: “They hang the small ones, and let the big ones go. (…) Tax evaders, especially if they do it on a large scale, get off much better than welfare cheats in Germany.”
Brorhilker compared her transition from Cum-ex investigations at the prosecutor’s office to working at Finanzwende with a doctor deciding “not to treat individual patients any longer, but to go into research to develop a therapy, to tackle the problem at its root, so to speak.”
Finanzwende founder Gerhard Schick called her decision a courageous step: “Anne Brorhilker’s move to Finanzwende is a declaration of war on financial criminals and their supporters. This should be a wake-up call to finally make the prosecution of financial crime a political priority in Germany.”
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