The 24-year-old former operator of a corona test center is said to have snatched over a million euros together with a 38-year-old and a 21-year-old. The three people are now in the dock at the Saarbrücken district court. The public prosecutor’s office is accusing them of fraud.
The prosecution accuses the trio of having wrongly reported over 150,000 Covid-19 tests to the Saarland Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians (KV) between December 2021 and July 2022, but in fact only four percent of these – around 6,000 swabs – were actually carried out, according to the public prosecutor’s office. Over 145,000 corona tests would therefore have been fictitious. These tests were “freely fictitious for fraudulent purposes and deliberately recorded multiple times,” according to the prosecution. The Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians paid the 24-year-old a total of 1,033,152 euros. According to the prosecution, the operator “created a long-term source of income of not inconsiderable size at the expense of society and thus increased his standard of living.” The charges against him are: fraud in eight cases and attempted fraud. The 21-year-old and the 38-year-old are charged with fraud in four cases, both of them having only worked in the test centers for four months. The prosecution calculates the billing for one month as one case.
“I noticed that something wasn’t right”
In the two St. Ingbert test centers – one in the city center, the other in the Hassel district – the defendants are said to have received monthly payments of between 170,000 and 304,000 euros according to their falsified statements. The 38-year-old ex-employee managed the test center in Hassel for the 24-year-old in his absence. She drew up the shift schedules, instructed employees and had the authority to give them instructions, according to the prosecutor. The 38-year-old repeatedly presented the employees with stacks of test certificates and lists with fictitious data and supposedly tested people. The employees were supposed to repeatedly record the relevant people and test certificates as newly carried out tests.
In the trial on Wednesday, the 38-year-old made a partial confession sitting next to her defense attorney Michael Rehberger. “I noticed that something was wrong, that there was a fraud going on. Fake phone numbers or ones with zeros were entered into the system for the fictitious test subjects.” The judge countered: “Nevertheless, they continued.” The defendant sheepishly admitted this accusation on the grounds that, as a single parent, she had to worry about the well-being of her child. The defendant worked at the test center for four months from January to April 2022.
Two defendants remain silent
The third defendant, now 21 years old, also worked at the Hassel test center. He was commissioned by the 24-year-old operator to “deliberately create test certificates from non-existent people,” according to the public prosecutor’s office. After the 38-year-old defendant left the test center in April 2022, he took over as the 24-year-old operator’s right-hand man. “From then on, he repeatedly presented the other employees of the test center with stacks of test certificates and lists of fictitious data and supposedly tested people and instructed the employees to repeatedly record the corresponding data as newly conducted tests,” says the prosecutor. The 21-year-old knew that the tests were not carried out so frequently and that “the number of people and test data was arbitrarily fictitious,” writes the prosecution. The 21-year-old remained silent on the charges during the trial on Wednesday, as did his former boss. The chamber has scheduled seven more days of hearings for the trial.
