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Exec at children’s TV station Kika jailed for embezzling millions

A former executive for the German children’s TV channel Kinderkanal (Kika) was sentenced on Tuesday to more than five years in jail for stealing millions from the public broadcaster.

Published: 5 July 2011 16:59 CEST
Exec at children’s TV station Kika jailed for embezzling millions
Photo: DPA

Marco K., a 44-year-old production manager, was convicted of 48 counts of fraud and accepting bribes by a court in the eastern German city of Erfurt. Judges handed him a milder sentence of five years and three months after taking into consideration his full confession and serious gambling addiction.

Prosecutors had demanded almost seven years in jail for costing Kika, which supplies content to ARD and ZDF, millions and seriously damaging trust in Germany’s public broadcast system.

Judges found Marco K. paid bogus invoices to the now-insolvent Berlin production company Kopp Film. Allegedly half of around €4.62 million in Kika cash ended up in his pocket, but he reportedly blew at least €500,000 in one year on gambling vending machines.

Udo Reiter, the head of TV channel MDR, which is responsible for Kika, admitted earlier this year that there were serious flaws in the way the network monitored its accounting.

The bogus bills were so detailed and specific that an outsider who was not directly involved in production could not, without great difficultly, see that they were false, Reiter said.

DAPD/The Local/mry

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CRIME

Teenager turns self in after attack on German politician

A 17-year-old has turned himself in to police in Germany after an attack on a lawmaker that the country's leaders decried as a threat to democracy.

Published: 5 May 2024 12:52 CEST
Teenager turns self in after attack on German politician

The teenager reported to police in the eastern city of Dresden early Sunday morning and said he was “the perpetrator who had knocked down the SPD politician”, police said in a statement.

Matthias Ecke, 41, European parliament lawmaker for Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), was set upon by four attackers as he put up EU election posters in Dresden on Friday night, according to police.

Ecke was “seriously injured” and required an operation after the attack, his party said.

Scholz on Saturday condemned the attack as a threat to democracy.

“We must never accept such acts of violence,” he said.

Ecke, who is head of the SPD’s European election list in the Saxony region, was just the latest political target to be attacked in Germany.

Police said a 28-year-old man putting up posters for the Greens had been “punched” and “kicked” earlier in the evening on the same Dresden street.

Last week two Greens deputies were abused while campaigning in Essen in western Germany and another was surrounded by dozens of demonstrators in her car in the east of the country.

According to provisional police figures, 2,790 crimes were committed against politicians in Germany in 2023, up from 1,806 the previous year, but less than the 2,840 recorded in 2021, when legislative elections took place.

A group of activists against the far right has called for demonstrations against the attack on Ecke in Dresden and Berlin on Sunday, Der Spiegel magazine said.

According to the Tagesspiegel newspaper, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser is planning to call a special conference with Germany’s regional interior ministers next week to address violence against politicians.

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