Arms dealer gets tough sentence
Arms dealer Karlheinz Schreiber has been sentenced by a court in the German city of Augsburg to eight years in prison for tax evasion.
The Swiss government provided Germany with legal assistance in the case, allowing Germany to use bank documents it secured from Switzerland in 1999.
The lead judge said the trial closed the Schreiber case, which “brought the party-funding scandal of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to light”.
The 76-year-old Schreiber, who holds dual Canadian and German citizenship, was found guilty of not paying income tax on millions of dollars in commissions in connection with the sale of German armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia.
Schreiber was arrested in Canada in 1999 under a German warrant. He was sent to Germany in August 2009 for trial after losing a ten-year battle against extradition.
He also allegedly gave a cash donation in 1991 to the former treasurer of then-chancellor Helmut Kohl’s CDU. That allegation triggered a scandal that deepened with Kohl’s 1999 admission that he had personally accepted illegal donations from supporters.
Schreiber has also been associated with a separate Canadian political scandal.
Former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney acknowledged accepting money from Schreiber in exchange for promoting a project involving a light armoured vehicle factory on behalf of Germany’s Thyssen AG. But Mulroney said it happened after he had left politics.
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