Surprisingly, the proceedings in the summer fairytale affair surrounding the 2006 World Cup against the former DFB officials Horst R. Schmidt, Theo Zwanziger and Wolfgang Niersbach are being continued. The Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt has overturned the hiring decision of the Regional Court of Frankfurt made at the end of October 2022. This was announced by the Higher Regional Court on Monday.

"The public prosecutor's office accuses the three accused of evading or assisting in the evasion of corporation tax, solidarity surcharge, trade tax and sales tax for 2006," says the statement from the Higher Regional Court. The trio is said to have caused or contributed to the fact that the repayment of a loan of 6.7 million euros to the world association Fifa "was wrongly offset as an operating expense of the DFB in 2006, reducing income and taxes".

The regional court had discontinued the proceedings because of the ban on double jeopardy, after proceedings in Switzerland against the accused of fraud or aiding and abetting fraud had previously been discontinued. In the opinion of the Higher Regional Court, however, it was not a matter of a complex of "inextricably linked facts", even if both charges were linked to a coherent overall historical complex.