BERLIN, Jan. 30 (Xinhua) -- A former top lawyer of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in Germany was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for aiding and abetting serious tax evasion in the "cum-ex" scandal, the Frankfurt am Main Regional Court ruled on Tuesday.
The man, whose sentence can still be appealed, had advised Maple Bank on cum-ex deals, a business model allowing wide-scale tax rebates on sums that were never paid. It was unclear for a long time whether such deals were illegal.
According to expert calculations, Europe's largest economy lost almost 36 billion euros (38.9 billion U.S. dollars). Other countries in the bloc also recorded losses in the billions.
According to the indictment, Maple Bank alone caused a tax loss of around 388 million euros. In addition to the convicted lawyer, a former Maple banker received a two-year suspended sentence for tax evasion after having confessed at the start of the trial.
The key figure in the scandal, Hanno Berger, received his second verdict last year, bringing the total prison term to 15 years. Previously, the man considered to be the pioneer of the cum-ex deals had evaded German justice for years in Switzerland. (1 euro = 1.08 U.S. dollar)
