On this site, we advocate saying something if you see something. Public reporting and public protest are among the best tools available to combat corruption. But we are not naïve. There are consequences to standing up and standing out.
A story that has hit headlines across Europe concerns a German vintage car dealer who reported transactions he thought his wife was conducting. They involved the sending and hiding undeclared income of German citizens in a Swiss bank account. Most of the illegal money was funnelled through Hypo Vereinsbank (Hypovereinsbank Rport 2003 ) which has been taken over by UniCredit of Italy.
After Gustl Mollath reported this, he was taken to trial and accused of beating his wife and slashing tires on cars. His reports of tax evasion were treated as the musings of a paranoid. While the sequence of events surrounding the Mollath Affair are not clear, it may have been convenient for interested parties to put Mollath away in an insane asylum for life rather than taking him to trial for wife beating.
In any case, the mix of a marriage falling apart, Bavarian politics and bank takeovers leaves a murky trail.
The following is known: the bank admits employees laundered money, a physician who wrote the report that Mollath beat his wife had never met either party. And a Bavarian Minister of Justice Beate Merk, said that there was no evidence of money laundering when the bank’s admission is a matter of public record. She later changed her story: whatever transactions had taken place were ‘not indictable.’
Only public outcries and an upcoming election got Mollath released from the asylum. He is free until another trial is commenced. One wonders on what grounds a new trial can be instituted since all the evidence in the first trial was fraudulent or tainted.
Because Mollath is not your ordinary whistleblower, and may have come forward with information he gathered in his home to hurt his wife as part of a domestic dispute, we are not prepared to say that he fits the classic whistleblower mode.
What we can say is that his treatment was horrific. In the very city where Nazi criminals were tried after the Second World War, a higher court “Oberlandesgericht Nuremberg” freed Mollath. The Mollath Affair
More on German side
Mollath: gustl-for-help