A 39-year-old from a well-known Berlin clan family has been sentenced to nine months probation for commercial fraud. The Tiergarten district court saw it as proven on Thursday that he had breached his duty to provide the job center with no information about his assets and inheritance in September 2014 and had thus wrongly received unemployment benefit II of around 12,500 euros. Previously, real estate had been purchased by a trustee who had used the accused.
The man from an extended Arab family is said to have received welfare benefits between 2013 and September 2015. The process involved payments from October 2014. Further suspected acts of fraud could no longer be prosecuted because the statute of limitations had expired, but confiscation was possible, it said at the hearing. The court followed the prosecutor’s request and ordered the confiscation of around 24,300 euros.
The 39-year-old is said to have bought two properties in Neukölln in December 2013 and July 2014 through a straw man. According to the indictment, he had at least around 370,000 euros at his disposal at the time. The presiding judge said she assumed there was an inheritance in Lebanon, the defendant was a joint heir – “by whomever”. By 2013 at the latest, he had received money to purchase real estate.
According to him, the 39-year-old is now the managing director of his own GmbH in the area of rental and leasing. His defense attorney had pleaded for acquittal. It is a community of heirs. At that time, money was made available to his client for a specific purpose in order to purchase real estate for the community of heirs. The verdict is not yet legally binding. (dpa)
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