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The Zurich policeman and the spy: a story as an agent thriller
The indictment reads like an agent suspense script. The case of a cantonal policeman who is said to have obtained information about a Ukrainian oligarch for a German spy will be heard in the Zurich district court on Wednesday.
It’s hard to see what prompted him to do it. It could hardly have been the little money. There was also no lack of tension in his life: he knew the Islamist scene very well and he fought against drug trafficking and human trafficking. So what led Christoph Gerber * to leak secret information to a former Stasi agent?
The case of former Zurich canton police officer Gerber will be heard at the Zurich District Court on Wednesday. He is charged with passive bribery and abuse of multiple powers. The presumption of innocence applies until a final court ruling.
Former Stasi employee and Zurich canton policeman
If the accusation is to be believed, it should all have started with the meeting of Christoph Gerber and Christina Wilkening.
Wilkening was born in Berlin and still lives there today. The now 72-year-old is no stranger. In the days of the GDR she worked for the Stasi under the code name “Nina”, after the fall of the Berlin Wall she tried her luck as a book author, but quickly returned to more familiar areas. As a private news vendor, she made money selling information that was difficult to obtain legally. For example, he tried to fix oil thefts for Romanian raw materials group Petrom.
His last assignment took Wilkening to a German prison. She was arrested on April 20, 2016, on bribery charges. In the course of the investigation, it turned out that Wilkening could rely on an international network of police and other public officials for information. In Austria, an intelligence officer is under investigation, in Germany two police officers were arrested and in Switzerland the cantonal police officer Christoph Gerber.
Gerber and Wilkening are said to have worked together since December 2013. The indictment does not clarify exactly how this partnership came about. The “Tagesanzeiger” reported last year that the two met at a Vienna conference on white-collar crime in October 2012 and that Wilkening has since tried to gain Gerber’s trust.
Expensive meals in Baur au Lac and bribes from Ukraine
According to the prosecution, there were repeated meetings between the two, sometimes at the Confiserie Sprüngli on Paradeplatz, sometimes at Baur au Lac in Bürkliplatz. Christine Wilkening often spoke of her “projects”, as she called them. They were all kinds of orders. In January 2014, he asked Gerber for the first time to abuse his starting status for an assignment.
The canton police officer was supposed to clarify the origin of a key for Wilkening that private clients believed might belong to a safe in Switzerland. Gerber agreed, made inquiries under the guise of an official police investigation. And I found nothing.
Despite this, Wilkening continued to feed the accused with orders. These also became increasingly explosive. In January 2015, he was supposed to investigate the arrest of the Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash. Firtasch had an alleged arch enemy linked to a Swiss company. Gerber is said to have collected names, addresses and phone numbers of people from this company in law enforcement systems.
Wilkening did not ignore the policeman’s work. At his meetings, he mostly invited Gerber to dinner, handed him an envelope with cash. Between 1000 and 2500 euros were on it.
The relationship between Wilkening and Gerber culminated in the “Delta Project.” It was Mykola Martynenko, a Ukrainian politician and chairman of the parliamentary energy commission. In 2013 this was embroiled in a bribery and money laundering scandal. He was accused of having accepted a bribe of 30 million Swiss francs from the Czech company Skoda JS. Martynenko is said to have awarded the Czech company a multi-million dollar contract to modernize Ukraine’s nuclear power plants.
The bribe was frozen in the account of a private Swiss bank and Switzerland opened an investigation into Martynenko. Wilkening was supposed to come up with a counter-strategy for the Ukrainian and needed information on the status of the investigation in Switzerland. He first tried to contact former federal prosecutor Michael Lauber or one of his employees, but to no avail.
Then Gerber began investigating various police systems. Among other things, it provided Wilkening with the private address of the federal prosecutor in charge. In doing so, he used adventurous methods. For example, he contacted the investigator in charge of the Federal Criminal Police on the pretext that he had been able to gather information on a Russian rock group called “Putin’s Night Wolves” through Vladimir Martynenko (an imaginary brother). What exactly he wanted to achieve on this pretext is not apparent from the indictment.
The case of the canton policeman raises a series of questions. However, the prosecution is demanding a 15-month suspended prison term and compensation of 25,000 Swiss francs for abuse of power.
* Name changed
