Probably ill-advised by that traitorous fuck Feigen (one of his attorneys).
Openly worked against him during today's trial 2 times!! Unbelievable.
What the point of Feigens' interceptions was is also a mystery.
As it stands, the question will be whether the confessed evasions were 'included' in his initial voluntary declaration or if they weren't. Hard to tell as a spectator, but if they were, the prosecution wouldn't have started of with 3.5 mil € in the indictment. And why the tax fraud investigation was seemingly not able to find the other 15 mil, even after he put his declaration in will also be a question for the court.
Even worse, given that Hoeneß casually came out with this the day the trial opened, it also means that the court can't take these new numbers at face value and there will most likely be further investigations.
The only reasonable explanation of the procedure today is to portray Hoeneß as remorsefully pulling the safety brake, ready to put all the cards to table, confessing everything and try to demonstrate that the way back to tax-compliance was driven by remorse and his own free will (and not due to already pending investigations) to reach mitigation. Some of the charges might also be time-barred, as tax-evasion is no continous offence. And that's about it.
I think the approach is high-risk and might actually make things worse; then again Feigen is no rookie and his client list, like for example Zumwinkel and Fitschen, reads like a who is who of the German economy.
Wouldn't he avoid going to jail if he could prove he voluntarily came forward about the taxes he evaded? And I heard there was going to be a secret witness who would show that Hoeness was planning on coming forward to the German authorities before he was caught? How did that go?
He would avoid penalty completely if his voluntary declaration was 'voluntary' in the legal sense. This, among other things, requires though that the voluntary declaration is exhaustive. And aside from the fact that he submitted the relevant documents in piecemeal over the course of a year which already speaks against him, he basically confessed today that it wasn't exhaustive. The effect of amnesty wouldn't apply in these circumstances even if an investigation wasn't pending at that time.
Although, as I said, if he had no knowledge of investigation, it might (with a heavy emphasis on might) be considered in mitigation.
This is actually the trap of the voluntary declaration in german tax law. You need to it completely and formally correct, or the whole approach backfires and turns into a criminal procedure.
What a joke.
