GERMANY lacks thousands of public prosecutors to fight effectively financial crime, The German Association of Judges (DRB) has warned. It said that criminals in the world of money and economics, as well as real mafia organizations, have it very easy in Germany because there are not enough state prosecutors and judges to handle all the cases.
“Billions of euros are slipping away from the German federal states because they are too focused on personnel costs in the investigative bodies,” DRB director Sven Rebehn told the Funke newspaper in late December. “Every additional euro invested in hiring more investigators for a more effective fight against financial crime and economics “It would ultimately bring more euros to the state coffers.”
Rebehn estimates that Germany is short of around 2.000 state prosecutors and warns that around a million open cases are still uninvestigated. In addition, many such illegal actions have a relatively short statute of limitations, which makes life a nightmare for criminals even if they are caught with their hands in the – usually state coffers.
Grsuch abductions should be organized by a veritable army of experts
The thesis that Germany is a “paradise for financial crime” has been heard several times, where it had to be said that it took years for the competent services to understand the scale of the financial operations of organized criminal groups. Cases like Wirecard and CumEx have cost the country billions of euros.
Jacob Wende, a lawyer specializing in financial law and director of Regpi, a company that deals with financial crime protection, believes that the problem is not just a lack of state lawyers, but a lack of training at all levels. Because it is not uncommon for such robberies to be organized by a veritable army of legal and tax experts, with whom state authorities rarely know how to keep up: “We are certainly far below our capabilities,” Wende told DW.
“We need more people, but also people who are better trained in all areas – among state lawyers, in the courts and in oversight bodies.”
This is particularly problematic because these forms of crime are, as Wende says, a “moving target.” “There is no single method that organized criminals use. They are constantly adapting, they are constantly looking for gaps in the system, and they will always look to exploit those gaps.”
The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing
An additional problem is the fragmentation of institutions in Germany. There is a large and unaccountable number of judicial and investigative bodies in the 16 federal states, and each of them often deals with different types of financial crime in different areas.
Kilian Wegner, professor of sustainable economic law at the University of Halle, says there are more than 300 supervisory bodies operating across the country in areas such as gambling or precious metals trading, many of which are looking for more skilled people. “It is very difficult to determine whether there is information in any of these bodies that could be relevant to a money laundering investigation in another area,” Wegner told DW. “Each one does its own part separately, which leads to a huge loss of information.”
Anne Brorhilker is one of the people who knows these problems firsthand. She was a top state prosecutor in Cologne for two decades and became famous throughout Germany for investigating the CumEx fraud scheme, in which banks and stockbrokers siphoned billions of euros from state coffers across Europe in a financial “game” of apparent ownership changes when dividend taxes were due. Germany alone is estimated to have lost around 30 billion euros.
Documents circulate, but the crime is not investigated
The main problem, according to Brorhilker, is not the number of state prosecutors, but the excessive bureaucracy in these institutions. Because there may be enough people on paper, but there are very few who are actually involved in criminal prosecution: “We have a lot of people in management and administration, but few who actually do the work,” she told DW.
“It’s true that we don’t have enough state prosecutors conducting investigations and taking cases to court, but they could allocate staff differently in advance.”
She also believes that the structure of the judicial system encourages state prosecutors to deal with easier cases with a high chance of success. Of course, it is easier and faster to conclude the procedure in a banal case of shoplifting, even if it hardly has any social impact. “The professional criminals who cause the greatest damage to society get away with it easily,” she warns. Brorhilker left the judiciary in 2024 and became one of the leaders of the non-governmental organization “Finanzwende.” It is an organization that advocates changing the way the state fights financial crime and opposes the influence of financial lobbies.
Concrete example: a suitcase full of money
Brorhilker was outraged by the lack of communication between state institutions: “Let’s say someone is caught at the airport with a large amount of money in a bag. The customs officers at the border crossing discover it and eventually inform their superiors about it. Then it drags on as a customs violation because they, as a rule, do not report it to the tax administration at all. Even when the circumstances speak for themselves, they often do not even inform the police.”
While law enforcement agencies each do their part, there is a lot of tax evasion and money laundering going on at the same time, and organized groups and the same people are often behind it. While the police, for example, are trying to catch drug traffickers, drug money is already slipping under the radar of the tax administration. And before tax investigators realize what has happened, the money has already been laundered and thus falls under the jurisdiction of a completely different institution.
Other countries organize this work more effectively. In Europe, Italy has a lot of experience – but also efficiency: tax, customs and financial crime, only one body can be responsible for all of this.
At least 100 billion euros are lost every year
It is also difficult to estimate the extent of the damage caused by financial crime. Judge Rebehn estimates that around 100 billion euros are “laundered” every year in Germany, but this amount, which is often cited in the German media, is based on a 2016 study by the University of Halle in which conclusions are drawn on the basis of known cases. The actual level has never been determined.
Politicians are now routinely emphasizing their determination to combat the problem. And Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government announced last July that it would pay the federal states 240 million euros to hire 2,000 additional judges and state prosecutors.
But it has already been shown that all attempts at comprehensive reform to make the entire system simpler are extremely difficult and almost hopeless.
The fight against bureaucracy
This became clear when the government of former Chancellor Olaf Scholz tried to create a central anti-money laundering body. “A huge dispute immediately erupted,” said Wegner of the University of Halle.
“Under whose supervision should this agency be? The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Customs Investigation Service? At the federal or state level? And if states, how much would one get, how much would the other get? No one could decide where this new body should fit into that big mosaic.” In the end, the plan was abandoned.
The deeper problem with financial crime, Wegner believes, lies in the culture that prevails in much of the German judiciary: “A specialized career is not valued very much,” he says. “If you want to advance and have a higher salary, you have to change jobs every few years: two or three years working on capital crimes, then two or three years working in the ministry and then the same amount of time on narcotics. That is the typical path to a successful career because otherwise you are considered too ‘buried’ in just one field.”
This rigid culture of thinking, Brorhilker concludes, is the main problem of the German judiciary. And it will not be solved simply by increasing the budget and the number of employees.