Koch extradition verdict expected next week

THE High Court judgement on German fraud suspect Hans Juergen Koch’s appeal against a Tsumeb Magistrate’s Court finding that he could be extradited to Germany to be put on trial is set to be delivered next week.

In a highly unusual move, the Registrar of the High Court, Jan Joubert, on Tuesday issued a short press statement on behalf of Judge President Petrus Damaseb to announce that judgement in Koch’s appeal against the extradition order will be delivered in the course of next week. The Judge President had directed him to issue the statement “in view of the public and media interest in this matter,” Joubert stated.”The matter was heard before two judges both of whom must agree on the same result for there to be a decision of the Court,” according to Joubert.”The matter involved is complex and is of great importance to the parties involved.”Careful consideration of the issues ventilated at the hearing was therefore of the utmost importance.””The Judge President has been assured by the presiding judges that, the court now having come to a decision on the matter, judgement will be delivered in the course of next week.”The court’s decision has been pending since Judges Sylvester Mainga and Kato van Niekerk reserved their judgement on November 30 last year, following a hearing of legal arguments that had stretched over four days in total.The German government formally requested their Namibian counterpart in early October 2002 to arrest and detain Koch and to then extradite him to Germany, in order for him to be tried in his country of origin on 203 counts of fraud, 12 charges of tax evasion, and four counts of falsifying documents.Koch, then just over a week short of his 54th birthday, was arrested on October 14 2002.He has been detained, mostly at the Grootfontein Prison, since then.By today he will have spent two years and nine months in detention awaiting the finalisation of extradition proceedings.Koch has been fighting Germany’s extradition request both in the lower court at Tsumeb and in the High Court, after the first court had ruled that he can be extradited.Being only the second foreign national ever to have taken an appeal to Namibia’s High Court to fight an extradition request to another country, Koch’s case might well result in the court giving crucial guidelines on how extradition requests to Namibia will have to be lodged in order to meet the stringent procedural requirements that the country’s Extradition Act of 1996 contains.In the High Court, Koch’s legal team, consisting of Louis Botes and Rudi Cohrssen, had launched a total onslaught on the Tsumeb court’s ruling.Their attack was focused on two main fronts, though.On the one, they argued that the documents handed in at the Magistrate’s Court to set out the German authorities’ allegations against Koch, could not be regarded as evidence because they had not been properly authenticated – that is, proven to be genuine – in the way that Namibian law prescribed.In the second place, the lawyers argued that even if the documentation was accepted as evidence, it still did not prove that Koch had actually committed a single crime in respect of the charges on which Germany wants to bring him to trial.In the face of the Koch team’s arguments, Deputy Prosecutor-General Danie Small was constrained to make some concessions during the hearing of the appeal.These included a concession that there is nothing to show that the letter in which the German ambassador asked Namibia’s Justice Minister for Koch’s extradition, was authenticated to show that it indeed came from the official that is purported to have written it.If that letter had to be disregarded, the effect could be that there would also not be any reference on the case record about which German laws Koch is accused of having broken and what penalties he may face in terms of those laws – and these are both aspects that Namibia’s Extradition Act requires to be specifically set out in an extradition request.Koch has been living in Namibia, where he had bought and later developed a luxurious hunting farm, La Rochelle, in the Tsumeb district, since December 1999.The fraud charges against him in Germany involve the equivalent of about N$420 million.It is alleged that while running a financing scheme through which German local authorities were able to invest and borrow money between 1993 and 1998, he siphoned off some N$110 million of the money circulating in the scheme into his own pockets.Koch is also accused of having in reality set up a pyramid scheme in which constant contributions from investors were necessary to keep the scheme afloat, and that that the scheme duly collapsed as soon as he had left Germany to settle in Namibia – removed from the reach of the German law, until now at least.The Judge President had directed him to issue the statement “in view of the public and media interest in this matter,” Joubert stated.”The matter was heard before two judges both of whom must agree on the same result for there to be a decision of the Court,” according to Joubert.”The matter involved is complex and is of great importance to the parties involved. “Careful consideration of the issues ventilated at the hearing was therefore of the utmost importance.””The Judge President has been assured by the presiding judges that, the court now having come to a decision on the matter, judgement will be delivered in the course of next week.”The court’s decision has been pending since Judges Sylvester Mainga and Kato van Niekerk reserved their judgement on November 30 last year, following a hearing of legal arguments that had stretched over four days in total.The German government formally requested their Namibian counterpart in early October 2002 to arrest and detain Koch and to then extradite him to Germany, in order for him to be tried in his country of origin on 203 counts of fraud, 12 charges of tax evasion, and four counts of falsifying documents.Koch, then just over a week short of his 54th birthday, was arrested on October 14 2002.He has been detained, mostly at the Grootfontein Prison, since then.By today he will have spent two years and nine months in detention awaiting the finalisation of extradition proceedings.Koch has been fighting Germany’s extradition request both in the lower court at Tsumeb and in the High Court, after the first court had ruled that he can be extradited.Being only the second foreign national ever to have taken an appeal to Namibia’s High Court to fight an extradition request to another country, Koch’s case might well result in the court giving crucial guidelines on how extradition requests to Namibia will have to be lodged in order to meet the stringent procedural requirements that the country’s Extradition Act of 1996 contains.In the High Court, Koch’s legal team, consisting of Louis Botes and Rudi Cohrssen, had launched a total onslaught on the Tsumeb court’s ruling.Their attack was focused on two main fronts, though.On the one, they argued that the documents handed in at the Magistrate’s Court to set out the German authorities’ allegations against Koch, could not be regarded as evidence because they had not been properly authenticated – that is, proven to be genuine – in the way that Namibian law prescribed.In the second place, the lawyers argued that even if the documentation was accepted as evidence, it still did not prove that Koch had actually committed a single crime in respect of the charges on which Germany wants to bring him to trial.In the face of the Koch team’s arguments, Deputy Prosecutor-General Danie Small was constrained to make some concessions during the hearing of the appeal.These included a concession that there is nothing to show that the letter in which the German ambassador asked Namibia’s Justice Minister for Koch’s extradition, was authenticated to show that it indeed came from the official that is purported to have written it.If that letter had to be disregarded, the effect could be that there would also not be any reference on the case record about which German laws Koch is accused of having broken and what penalties he may face in terms of thos
e laws – and these are both aspects that Namibia’s Extradition Act requires to be specifically set out in an extradition request.Koch has been living in Namibia, where he had bought and later developed a luxurious hunting farm, La Rochelle, in the Tsumeb district, since December 1999.The fraud charges against him in Germany involve the equivalent of about N$420 million.It is alleged that while running a financing scheme through which German local authorities were able to invest and borrow money between 1993 and 1998, he siphoned off some N$110 million of the money circulating in the scheme into his own pockets.Koch is also accused of having in reality set up a pyramid scheme in which constant contributions from investors were necessary to keep the scheme afloat, and that that the scheme duly collapsed as soon as he had left Germany to settle in Namibia – removed from the reach of the German law, until now at least.