“Strive to be wise rather than rich: wealth can be lost, but wisdom will always stay with you.”
Aesop
Germany is a successful, highly developed country in the heart of Europe, and it is rightly regarded as one of the most visited countries in the European Union. Many foreigners come to Germany for short trips, to study, to work or to join their families. To them, Germany looks like a prosperous, advanced country with a favorable location and a mild climate. There are objective reasons for this: the strength of the German economy makes it possible to earn a stable income, whether as a decent salary, as social benefits or as profits from running a business. That is not all that makes Germany attractive. In quality-of-life assessments of countries around the world, compiled on the basis of expert evaluations and published in numerous rankings, Germany is among the leaders, with only Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries ahead of it. One could say that Germany is practically flooded with tourists, as well as with migrants who, for one reason or another, want to stay in the country for good. Against this background, renting out accommodation and booking hotel rooms remains a highly attractive and sought-after line of business. This prompts local entrepreneurs to buy or lease hotels which, if run professionally, are guaranteed to turn a profit.
Which commercial properties are most often offered as hotels in Germany?
Small hotels or apartments. The most common option is a small hotel or a hotel-style apartment complex. The building usually has three floors, sometimes two or four. Almost all German hotels have a small plot of land. It is generally enough for a pool and a small recreation area, but hardly for a “city within a city”, since every square meter of land in this country is valued at an incredibly high price.
City-center hotels. Hotels right in the city center are a fairly rare phenomenon in Germany; they are mostly found in cities with a business focus, for example in the state of Berlin, near Hamburg or not far from Munich. Such hotels cater to guests travelling for business or business contacts, and they also offer comfort and amenities for affluent tourists.
Motels. Motels come in great variety. They are often put up for sale and are considered quite affordable commercial property. Most German motels are located in the eastern part of the country. This is where vehicle traffic from the CIS countries is concentrated and where demand for affordable accommodation is high. Motels therefore offer investors high returns.
As everyone knows, any business, the hotel business included, takes considerable effort, time and money. Running and managing your own company properly is an art that by no means everyone has mastered. But as the British statesman Winston Churchill aptly put it: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” In this article we tell how the manager of a small hotel on the outskirts of Frankfurt came to us, and how we helped him avoid punishment for an offense he had not committed.
The Client’s Story: An Offer “He Couldn’t Refuse”
A client came to our firm; let us call him Sergei. About five years earlier he had moved from Kazakhstan to Germany for permanent residence under the program for ethnic German resettlers (Spätaussiedler). For the first year and a half, Sergei learned German and got used to life in a country that was new to him. Once things had largely settled down, he started looking for work. The job search proved harder than he had expected. With his less-than-perfect German, a purely humanities-based degree from Kazakhstan and little work experience outside his field, the number of available positions was quite small. Sergei received one rejection after another, which did nothing for his self-confidence.
One weekend he met a distant relative; let us call him Igor. Neither man was in any hurry, so they decided to stop at a small beer restaurant and talk through everything that had built up recently in a calm, relaxed atmosphere. Sergei told his relative about his money problems: the support he received from the state did not cover everything, and so far he had only found a side job assembling furniture for a shop, which did not solve his pressing problems. Igor was sympathetic and made him an unexpected offer “he couldn’t refuse”. For three years Igor had been running a small leased hotel. As he explained, he had since moved into other lines of business, so he lacked the time and energy for everything, and the hotel needed someone to deal with all day-to-day matters on the spot.
So our future client was offered the post of director of the hotel, taking charge of all current business. When Sergei admitted that he had never done anything like it in his life and was afraid of letting his relative down, Igor replied that he would do everything to bring him up to speed quickly. He also assured the future director that he himself would “de facto” take responsibility for dealing with the authorities and for the bookkeeping. Having discussed all the financial and other details of their upcoming cooperation, the new partners only had to “shake hands” and go home. It was agreed that Sergei would start the new job the following Monday. Our future client was worried about how he would cope with work that was completely new to him, but he decided to rely on his relative’s word and thought he would solve any problems as they arose.
“A Bolt from the Blue”: Charges of Fraud and Document Forgery
At first everything went well, by and large. The new director started work, learned the ins and outs of the hotel business with his relative’s help, and learned to manage the staff and prepare the reports. After six months Sergei already felt quite confident, especially as his salary at the hotel allowed him a fairly carefree life. As so often happens, the “bolt from the blue” came completely unexpectedly. One day, returning home after a stressful day at work, he found in his letterbox a summons to a police interview on suspicion of fraud — Betrug (§ 263 StGB) — and document forgery — Urkundenfälschung (§ 267 StGB). If convicted, he faced a substantial fine or imprisonment of up to 5 years. Facing the difficult choice of not attending the interview, going alone, or turning to a lawyer, Sergei chose the last option. After reading positive reviews of our lawyers’ work online, he contacted our firm for advice and subsequent legal representation in his case.
The Relative’s Scheme: Phantom Guests and Falsified Invoices
The lawyer of our firm got to work immediately and requested the relevant documents from the police. As it turned out, the reason for such serious charges against our client lay in the actions of his relative Igor. The hotel took in guests for temporary stays, including refugees from other countries and homeless German citizens. The accommodation of these people was paid for in full by the state. Igor misused these funds: after a month he would tell such guests that they could no longer stay at the hotel because the period paid for by the state had expired. The guests, not fully aware of what they were entitled to, left the hotel and looked for somewhere else to live. Igor filled the vacated rooms with new guests while continuing to receive money from the state for the people he had turned out. He submitted forged documents and falsified invoices to the supervisory authorities. These machinations went on for quite a long time, until one homeless man who had been forced out of the hotel went to the social welfare office for help finding a new home, while according to official records he was still living at the hotel. Since, at the time the fraud came to light, the hotel was officially managed by our client, who was formally its director, all of the above charges were brought against Sergei.
The Lawyer’s Work: Three Arguments for Non-Involvement
To defend the client, the lawyer began gathering the necessary evidence and preparing to represent his interests at the trial — the Hauptverhandlung (main hearing). In support of our legal position, the following arguments were put forward:
- First, our client had not taken part in devising the fraud scheme, had received no income beyond his salary, and had not been personally involved in unlawfully evicting hotel guests;
- Second, Sergei had not personally signed any false accounting documents or submitted them to the German social welfare and supervisory authorities. To support this argument, a sample of the client’s signature from his passport was presented at the trial. The signature on the documents used to obtain the money unlawfully differed so much from the one in his passport that the court accepted this as sufficient, even without commissioning an additional handwriting expert report;
- Third, at the time of the last incident of misappropriation of public funds, the one that triggered the criminal proceedings, Sergei was not in the country at all, as he had flown home to Kazakhstan for four weeks. Documentary proof of this was also submitted to the court as evidence;
- moreover, all the unlawfully obtained money had already been repaid to the state.
In addition to these arguments, the lawyer also worked with the client to prepare him for the trial. The client had to explain to the court clearly and comprehensibly how and why this situation had arisen, how Sergei had come to take this job, and why for a long time he had not been aware of the responsibility his position carried for the company’s business. It was this careful, lengthy work with our lawyer that helped Sergei present himself competently at the trial and draw the court’s attention to the facts and arguments that proved the defendant’s innocence of the offense committed.
The Outcome: Full Acquittal
To our client’s great joy, and despite all the prosecutor’s efforts to hold him criminally liable, he was acquitted and all previous charges were dropped. Needless to say, Sergei was overjoyed to hear the good news at the end of the trial. We advised him to be more careful about taking on jobs in future, even when such “flattering” offers come from relatives. Then again, none of us is immune to mistakes, and should you, your relatives or friends ever face a similar “incident”, you are welcome to contact our firm.
All rights reserved. Copying or republishing this article requires a link to the original source.
