BERLIN (AP) – The German football federation has been convicted of tax evasion related to the awarding of the World Cup hosted by the country in 2006.

A regional court in Frankfurt fined the federation, known by its German acronym DFB, EUR110,000 (USD128,000) at the culmination of the nearly 16-month trial yesterday.

Prosecutors had been pushing for a larger fine after accusing the DFB of failing to pay approximately EUR2.7 million (now USD3.1 million) in taxes related to its payment of EUR6.7 million (USD7.8 million) to FIFA, world football’s governing body, in April 2005.

That payment settled a loan that Germany great Franz Beckenbauer, the head of the World Cup organising committee, had accepted three years earlier from Robert Louis-Dreyfus, a former Adidas executive and then part-owner of the Infront marketing agency.

The money was channeled through a Swiss law firm to a Qatari company belonging to Mohammed Bin Hammam, then a member of FIFA’s Executive Committee. The exact purpose of the money remained unclear.

The DFB concealed the repayment of the loan as a contribution toward a planned World Cup opening gala, which was later cancelled, and falsely declared it a business expense a year later.

Former DFB officials Theo Zwanziger, Wolfgang Niersbach, and Horst R Schmidt were originally charged in the trial. The proceedings against all three, who consistently denied the allegations of tax evasion, were eventually dropped upon payment of fines.

-- Courtesy of Borneo Bulletin