2023 Author: Eric Donovan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 15:44
At the toll operator Toll Collect, employees are said to have defrauded the state by several million euros. On Wednesday there was a raid at the company's headquarters in Berlin.
Employees of the toll operator Toll Collect are said to have defrauded the state of several million euros. Investigators searched the company headquarters in Berlin on Wednesday, as announced by the public prosecutor and the police. The authorities have several managers suspected of having inflated the cost of the federal government for expanding the truck toll on selected federal highways in 2012.
In the following years, the federal government therefore transferred too much money to Toll Collect. The investigators spoke of several million euros in damage, the exact amount is still being determined.
Damage at least three million euros
As the authorities announced, a former employee had brought the investigators on the trail. He filed a complaint. A Toll Collect spokeswoman said: "We support the authorities in their work." The Federal Ministry of Transport did not want to comment on the case. First, "Spiegel Online" reported on the case. Accordingly, the amount of damage should be at least three million euros.
The majority shareholders behind Toll Collect are the car manufacturer Daimler and Deutsche Telekom. The company has been collecting truck tolls in Germany on behalf of the federal government since 2005. We are currently looking for an operator for the period from 2018 to 2030, and TollCollect is also applying.
The system set up by Toll Collect has been responsible for collecting truck tolls on motorways and on 2300 kilometers of federal roads since 2005. In 2016, the state took in more than 4.6 billion euros. The operator remuneration is around 500 million euros. In the future, truck tolls will also be levied on the entire 39,000-kilometer network of federal highways. That should bring in another two billion euros per year. (dpa)
