The civil trial at the Giessen Regional Court for allegedly incorrectly billed taxi transports for asylum seekers was postponed again, although no new evidence or witnesses had been presented.
Archive photo: Moselle
GIESSEN – It is about 570,000 euros, which a 45-year-old taxi entrepreneur is said to have embezzled together with a former employee of the Gießen Regional Council (RP). But there will no longer be a decision in the civil law proceedings this year, Judge Beate Bremer adjourned the verdict in January 2021 after a brief hearing at the Giessen Regional Court after a brief hearing in which no new findings were brought to the table.
The civil proceedings are about compensation for illegal income of the taxi company at the expense of the taxpayer. He is said to have done this by billing for taxi rides that had not taken place at the height of the refugee crisis between October 2015 and January 2017 with the help of the former RP employee. Due to the distribution of up to 10,000 asylum seekers to other federal states and accommodation, the RP also used taxis as a means of transport.
The defendant’s lawyer, Ismail Cetin, continued to see too many inconsistencies in the evidence provided by the lawyers representing the RP. Instead of making blanket claims, the plaintiffs would have to work out alleged contradictions in the accounts and the kilometers actually driven by the taxis using GPS data. As a result, Cetin insisted that the lawsuit be dismissed.
Data deleted
Lawyer Jeanette Gorr countered why travel data at the taxi company first had to be deleted and then laboriously restored by the investigative authorities when everything was supposed to be in order. Instead, this data would have shown that the GPS data did not match the billed trips. “It is beyond dispute that trips that did not take place were billed and you have not yet been able to resolve these inconsistencies,” Gorr told Cetin. But he insisted: “No, that’s one to one.”
Although no new evidence or witnesses could be presented on Thursday by either side, Judge Bremer has not yet passed a judgment “in view of the complexity” of this case and postponed the proceedings, which had started on April 4, 2019, again into the coming year. The civil law part of this case is expected to be completed on January 7, 2021. Its criminal assessment has not yet started.
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