Obwalden lawyer Othmar Gabriel explains how he came to transfer 10 million francs to Qatar.
The people around him always took care of the finances: Franz Beckenbauer.
Walter Bieri / Keystone
The fact that Franz Beckenbauer moved to Sarnen in 1977 had a lot to do with Hans Hess. The lawyer once offered the footballer such an attractive tax deal that Obwalden was later placed under federal tax supervision: the canton was supposed to be protected from harming itself and others.
From 1981, Hess had a young employee in his office: Othmar Gabriel, initially a legal assistant and later a lawyer and notary himself. And decades later he got into another, even bigger affair because of Beckenbauer. In 2002, Gabriel transferred the 10 million francs that may have been used to buy the 2006 World Cup to an account in Qatar that was linked to the official Mohamed bin Hammam. The money came from former Adidas boss Robert Louis-Dreyfus.
Gabriel speaks publicly about the process for the first time with “NZZ am Sonntag”. The lawyer reports that he was asked at the time to forward the amount through his trust account. He saw no reason to reject the request. The money laundering laws were less strict in 2002 than they are today; they essentially only provided for basic credibility checks. And it is entirely plausible that a wealthy businessman like Louis-Dreyfus would want to transfer an amount of this amount. Especially since the money did not come from an obscure source, not from an exotic shell company at the end of the world, but in Swiss francs from a Swiss bank.
So Gabriel decided without further ado to process the transfer via his account. He says: “It was a ten-minute thing.” What happened with the money in Qatar is beyond his knowledge. He also no longer knows who discussed the transaction with him. One thing is certain, however: it wasn’t Beckenbauer himself. Those around him always took care of the financial aspects, for example the manager Robert Schwan.
The lawyer occasionally met the 1974 world champion at social events, such as a birthday party in Kitzbühel. “He seemed very decent to me and didn’t have any airs and graces,” he says.
Attorney Othmar Gabriel
Presse
When the 10 million payment became public in 2016, German reporters traveled to Sarnen and besieged Gabriel’s office. “Some believed we were the hub of corruption,” he says. “Underwater as a method,” said one news agency when Gabriel temporarily took his law firm’s website offline. It was said at the time that he had run away. In reality, he was in Florida to celebrate his 60th birthday.
Gabriel points out that the Swiss Federal Prosecutor’s Office questioned him but never opened proceedings against him. He did not enrich himself in any way.
In Sarnen the attention benefited him rather than harmed him. “People know each other here,” says the lawyer. “People don’t care about what they read in certain newspapers. You know, we just do our job.” Thanks to the affair surrounding the 2006 World Cup, word got out in the community about the prominent clients he was looking after.
Even his former boss Hess was not offended by the tax deal with Beckenbauer. On the contrary: the people of Obwalden later even elected him to the Council of States.
An article from “NZZ am Sonntag”