The German football federation has been convicted of tax evasion with regard to the allocation of the World Cup organized by the country in 2006.
A regional court in Frankfurt has a fine of the Federation, known under its German acronym DFB, 110,000 euros ($ 128,000) a fine of the peak of the nearly 16-month trial on Wednesday.
Public prosecutors had insisted on a larger fine after accusing the DFB of not paying around 2.7 million euros (now $ 3.1 million) in taxes with regard to payment of 6.7 million euros ($ 7.8 million) to FIFA, the administrative body of world football, in April 2005.
That payment took a loan that Germany Great Franz Beckenbauer, the head of the World Cup organization committee, had accepted Robert Louis-Dreyfus three years earlier, a former adidas director and subsequently part-owner of the Marketing Agency.
The money was channeled by a Swiss law firm to a Qatari company of Mohammed Bin Hammam, then a member of the FIFAs Executive Committee. The exact purpose of the money remained unclear.
The DFB hid the reimbursement of the loan as a contribution to a planned World Cup opening gala, which was later canceled, and a year later it wrongly declared a business costs.
Former DFB officials Theo Zwanziger, Wolfgang Nierbach and Horst R. Schmidt were originally sued in the process. The procedure against all three, which consistently denied the allegations of tax evasion, was eventually fallen when paying fines.
