Yeboah tax trial snares two more

FRANKFURT (August 10, 2000 6:27 p.m.) - Germany's public prosecutors announced they are opening an investigation into two former Eintracht Frankfurt officials after incriminating evidence given Thursday on the second day of Tony Yeboah's tax evasion trial.

Ex-Frankfurt president Matthias Ohms and former club secretary Detlef Romeiko were originally called as witnesses in the Yeboah trial, but were instead greeted with the news Thursday that they themselves are suspects too. It is alleged that Yeboah failed to pay tax on 2.3 million marks ($1 million) in a tax minimization scheme cooked up in 1993 by Ohms, Romeiko, two other former club functionaries Bern Holzenbein (former club manager), and Wolfgang Knispel (ex-treasurer) and Yeboah's ex-adviser Johannes van Berk. The Ghanaian striker claims he knows nothing about German tax laws and only signed where he was told to in the contract negotiations. He insists that the money he received was a net payment, leaving the onus on Frankfurt to pay the requisite income tax.

The latest development of investigating Ohms and Romeiko has given Yeboah's trial an unexpected twist.

It also prevented his lawyer from making an application to the presiding judge Thursday to have the charges against Yeboah dismissed. This will happen next Tuesday, on day three of the 11-day trial.

Both Ohms, who was Frankfurt's president between 1988 and 1996, and Romeiko deny any involvement in Yeboah's tax affair and refused to testify Thursday in their roles as witnesses. If formal charges are laid against them they will face a separate trial.

Yeboah does not actually owe the German tax office money anymore. In 1997, when he moved from Leeds United to Hamburg, he paid off his outstanding debt of 1 million marks.

Payment, however, does not exclude the lodging of charges for committing a punishable offense.