Losses 'between €100 and 200 billion'. A gap the size of the truth
Begin where every honest investigation begins: with the number they admit they don't have. Germany's annual loss to financial crime is estimated at €100 to €200 billion — a HUNDRED BILLION EURO margin of error, in the country that invented double-entry rigor as a personality. When the confidence interval is itself a national budget, the imprecision is the information. Somebody could measure it. Note that nobody has.
Now the timeline they printed without blushing. Cum-Ex: taxes paid once — or NEVER — refunded multiple times, for more than ten years, through the front door of the treasury, until 2011. The voluntary-disclosure counter, open since 1919, processed 30,000 confessions in two years — but only after investigators bought 'tax CDs' of Swiss bank data. Bought. From whom? At what price? Who ELSE bid? The confessions followed the leak, not the law. Deterrence in Germany has historically been a data breach.
And the new plan's centerpiece: an AI to 'decipher complex corporate structures and better identify front men'. Read that twice. The structures are complex ENOUGH TO REQUIRE AI. Human investigators, a century of them, couldn't hold the org charts in their heads — that was the design spec of the org charts. Now they're pointing a machine at the nesting dolls, and 1,500 new hires at the printouts.
We support this, cautiously, which is unusual for us and should tell you something. Watch two things: whose Porsche gets the 180 days first, and which names the AI is never asked about. The fronts have fronts. The math has always been there. You do the math — they're finally hiring people to.