The 29-year-old business owner from Copenhagen is the first to be convicted of fraud with help packages.
It is costly to try to cheat with the state aid packages that have sent billions out to distressed businesses during the corona crisis.
A 29-year-old business owner from Copenhagen must be true, after he has today been sentenced to one year and six months unconditional imprisonment for unjustifiably trying to get paid 427,500 kroner in salary compensation to five employees.
In addition to the prison sentence, he must pay an additional fine of one million kroner.
The man has been convicted of social fraud , but not of a particularly serious nature, as the prosecution had otherwise alleged.
The verdict today is interesting because a judge for the first time in a case of economic crime has ruled on how the court should use the fourfold increase in punishment for corona-related crime, which the parliamentary parties agreed in the spring.
‘Not a quadruple’
According to the prosecutor in the case, Camilla Helbo from the Law Office for Economic Crime under the Copenhagen Police, it cannot be stated with today’s verdict in hand that the penalty for cheating with aid packages has quadrupled.
However, she emphasizes that today’s prison sentence is far higher than usual.
– Normally, the staff will be around eight months. With the result we have today, the court has followed the possibility of imposing a longer sentence than we usually see in these cases, she says.
1 year and 6 months is the longest prison sentence with which one can be punished according to section 289 a of the Penal Code.
Comes after confession
The 29-year-old has admitted guilty in the case. He acknowledged, among other things, that the five people he had applied for compensation for were not employed by his company.
However, on the first day of the trial, which was Thursday last week, the public was not given the opportunity to hear the business owner’s explanation.
