One of the more unusual court cases ever in Germany.....opens shortly, the BVB-bomber episode.
To lay out the episode....back in mid-April, we had this major soccer team bus which had left a hotel for a game (Borussia Dortmund 09 is the name of the team).
They got about two minutes out of the hotel area, when some bomb went off next to the bus. One player was cut to some degree as the glass was impacted, but the bulk of the team was simply shocked....not injured.
Cops? They swarmed the local area, and great fear came out of possible terrorist action.
Then the folks at the hotel had this odd feeling. They had this weird guy who'd demanded to have a room on the front of the hotel....with windows facing the main road where the bomb had gone off. They told the cops about this weird guy.
Cops go, and review the guy....asking questions, and then arrest him.
What unfolds is this. This individual had some kind of scheme to buy stock in the team (they are the Frankfurt exchange). He had an investment strategy that involved the stock dropping massively after the bombing. The best guess is that he figured he'd clear near half-a-million Euro ($600,000 US dollars).
The reality is that the stock DID NOT drop like he thought it would, and he basically cleared near $7,000 US dollars.
A pretty stupid strategy but he was convinced it'd work.
Total cop time invested? That's the interesting part to the story.....there are 70 folders prepared, and near 18,000 pages of material. The court suggests that they can wrap this up in roughly 18 days.....more or less. Players of the team called in? Well, there is a suggestion that several will be called to testify.
What the guy might get? Folks are careful not to speculate on this. Just the physical threat is significant enough to get a decade in jail. Then you come to the speculative nature of the stock market and the manipulation involved. One might think a couple of years on this as a minimum.....IF convicted.
A page one story? No.....but for the team, BVB, this is number one news for the year.
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