Month: January 2016

Federal Supreme Court: Sedelmayer vs. Russia – No Set-off with Tax Claims

31 January 2016
by Peter Bert
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stock-photo-15986220-sign-quot-bundesgerichtshof-quotThis decision published by the Federal Supreme Court (Bundesgerichtshof) a couple of days ago on its website appears to be the latest instalment in the on-going saga of Franz Sedelmayer’s quest to enforce an investment treaty award  against Russia. Of course, the Federal Supreme Court sticks to Germany’s practise of anonymous court reporting. The facts reported in the decision are so unique, however, that it cannot be anything else but the Sedelmayer case.

Franz Sedelmayer was awared damages under the German-Russian Investment treaty in an arbitration seated in Stockholm in 1998, and has spent more than 15 years enforceing it. The details have been reported extensively, see for example, this piece in the New York Times. Read More

The People vs. Fritz Bauer: An Unlikely Movie Hero

19 January 2016
by Peter Bert
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fritz bauerFritz Bauer, the former State Attorney General (Generalstaatsanwalt) for the state of Hesse  and the man behind the Auschwitz Trials, for decades was known only to a small community of lawyers and historians. But even there, things took time: It was only in 1995 that the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt was established. Films about him would have been documentaries.

But all of a sudden, Fritz Bauer became a movie hero. In early 2015, the movie The Labyrinth of Lies came out. A second biopic came out later the same year: The People vs. Fritz Bauer, now followed by a TV feature movie: Die Akte General.

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Art Law: Final Report of the Gurlitt Taskforce Released

14 January 2016
by Peter Bert
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Task Force Gurlitt LOGOAt a press conference today, the Gurlitt taskforce presented its final report on the provenance research into the Schwabing art find. Regular readers will be familiar with the Gurlitt case, which we have covered here in quite some detail. In a nutshell, the Gurlitt taskforce was established in November 2013 to deal with the art collection of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of Hildebrand Gurlitt, a German art dealer who traded in degenerate art during the Nazi era. The collection was seized by the public prosecution (Staatsanwaltschaft) in Augsburg in early 2012 and was believed to contain a substantial number of looted artwork (see here for a detailed chronology of the Gurlitt saga in English). Read More