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![An Austrian is tried in the District Court of Bülach ZH. (Symbol image)]()
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An Austrian is tried in the District Court of Bülach ZH. (Symbol image)
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![The defendant ran a chain of doctors. He is held responsible for the largest corona fraud in Switzerland to date. (Symbol image)]()
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The defendant ran a chain of doctors. He is held responsible for the largest corona fraud in Switzerland to date. (Symbol image)
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![The entrepreneur is said to have fraudulently sneaked 3.5 million francs in Corona aid money with invented numbers. (Symbol image)]()
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The entrepreneur is said to have fraudulently sneaked 3.5 million francs in Corona aid money with invented numbers. (Symbol image)
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The former head of the practice chain “My doctor” has to answer before the district court in Bülach ZH today, Thursday. He wanted to rehabilitate his lurching practice chain with 22 corona loans and submitted fictitious information. It is the largest corona fraud in Switzerland to date.
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In September 2020 the chain of practices “My doctor” collapsed, countless patients in several cantons suddenly found themselves in front of closed doors, the employees faced an uncertain future.
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The head of the practice chain, now a 47-year-old Austrian, went underground, but was arrested in Italy and extradited to Switzerland. He has been in prison since October 2020.
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Fictitious numbers
In the past few years, the accused had taken over dozens of general practitioners’ practices in Switzerland that had no successor. His company, “My Doctor”, let doctors work as employees and took care of the unpopular administration for them.
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While the idea was actually a good one, the chain got increasingly into trouble, largely because of its aggressive expansion strategy. The 47-year-old put what his medical practices earned directly into the expansion of his chain, and debt enforcements increased. In addition, he also granted himself loans.
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When he learned from the media that the federal government was paying out loans of up to half a million francs per company because of the corona pandemic, he saw the solution to his problems: he applied for corona loans for 22 practices. The figures he gave Credit Suisse were fictitious and completely exaggerated.
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Defendant expected “unbureaucratic” handling
He trusted that the bank employees would process the applications “unbureaucratically” because of overload, so they would not examine them in detail. With the true information, he would only have received a loan of 690,000 francs. But he received 3.5 million francs – even though his imbalance originally had nothing to do with the pandemic. The pandemic only made his situation worse.
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The public prosecutor demands a prison sentence of 36 months for multiple embezzlement and multiple fraud, of which the accused has to serve 10 months, which he has almost achieved. He has been behind bars for 243 days.
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The remaining 26 months are to be imposed conditionally, with a trial period of two years. For this purpose, the Austrian should be expelled from the country for five years. The process takes place in the abbreviated procedure. This means that the man has confessed and the prosecutor’s complaint may be brought up for judgment. He only paid back part of the CHF 3.5 million. He still owes the federal government 3.2 million francs. (SDA)
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