The daughter of former CSU General Secretary Gerold Tandler earned millions by arranging corona masks. Now she is attacking her ex-advisors. They reject the allegations.
Dusseldorf. The old year ends with imprisonment, the new year begins with a bill. Tuesday, January 2nd, 2024. Andrea Tandler, entrepreneur in Munich, finds mail for her company, Little Penguin GmbH. The sender is the law firm YPOG from Berlin and is demanding more than 160,000 euros.
Tandler doesn't understand. She was in custody for ten and a half months and was convicted of tax evasion on December 15, 2023. Now she finds this bill. For an achievement, says Tandler, that she has never heard of.
Tandler calls her advisor from the Munich law firm Peters, Schönberger & Partner (PSP), which has been supporting her for two and a half years. He knows his law firm's order to YPOG and promises to send them the relevant documents. They come by email the next day, without a word of explanation, according to Tandler.
Tandler is not a tax lawyer. She puts the papers away. It wasn't until two years later that she understood what she was holding in her hands. Her advisors, Tandler says today, got her convicted. Your accusation: false advice and embezzlement of documents.
Tandler's criminal complaint will be received by the Munich I public prosecutor's office in June 2026. They were written by three lawyers, including Thomas Fischer, former presiding judge at the Federal Court of Justice. It is directed against five consultants from the PSP law firm who have advised Tandler and her business partner Darius N. since spring 2020. The PSP men deny the allegations.
The complaint accuses a PSP lawyer of party betrayal, suppression of documents and serious deprivation of liberty through omission. She accuses the four other consultants of incitement, aiding and abetting and tax evasion through omission. Party betrayal is considered a serious breach of a lawyer's duties.
At PSP, the advance is considered a tactical maneuver. “We have not violated any advisory obligations,” says a spokesman for the law firm. The complaint is an attempt to use the public to put pressure on the court and public prosecutor's office. Because her former client had not exempted the law firm from client confidentiality, she was unable to comment further.
The roots of the discord lie in the pandemic. On January 27, 2020, Bavaria reported the first corona case in Germany, and three weeks later around 300 people came together for the carnival session in the Heinsberg district in North Rhine-Westphalia. A few days later there was the first major eruption there.
Practically overnight, everyone around the world was looking for a product that hardly anyone had thought about before: protective masks for the mouth and nose. The pandemic created a huge market. The federal government also had a great need; CDU Health Minister Jens Spahn was responsible.
For Andrea Tandler, 2020 turned catastrophe into an opportunity. As she later explained in court, an acquaintance called her. He told her about three friends from Switzerland whose company, Emix, imported goods from China and around the world. Wouldn't she like to become the contact person for this company in Germany?
Tandler ran the Pfennigturm PR agency. Customers included a local sausage factory, a small animal practice and a dentist. Tandler had never traded in medical products before. But she had another resource - an extensive network. Her father Gerold Tandler was one of the most influential politicians in Bavaria in the 1970s and 1980s as CSU general secretary and interior and finance minister.
Monika Hohlmeier, daughter of the former Bavarian Prime Minister Franz Josef Strauß and a CSU MEP at the time, was also friends with Tandler. She established contacts with the Bavarian Ministry of Health and the federal government.
“We still take everything from everything!” Spahn wrote this sentence to her on March 8, 2020, Tandler later said in court. A day later, she presented Emix's offer to the ministry. On March 12, the federal government concluded the first contract with the Swiss company. Three more contracts for millions of masks followed by April 24th. The federal government paid an average of 5.58 euros for a single FFP2 mask. Tandler and her business partner ultimately received 48.4 million euros in commission from Emix.
Tandler didn't need an office for her million-dollar business. In her new field of activity, she trusted her friend Darius N., even though he also had no experience with medical products. N. was a restaurateur and ran the Café Pinguin and the Restaurant Arrabbiata in Munich. He and Tandler worked on their mask deals from their rooms.
But both probably suspected that business of this size needed a solid structure. On March 27, 2020, N. called PSP, a large law firm with 200 employees in Munich's best location at Siegestor. Her advisors include Kurt Faltlhauser, the former Bavarian finance minister.
In the following days, Tandler and N. are said to have told the PSP experts what kind of business they were doing and how it had gone so far. At the end of March there was a video conference between the PSP consultants and their clients Tandler and N. The lawyers and tax consultants are said to have suggested a model of two holding companies and an operating GmbH for the mask business.
The model was designed to keep the tax burden as low as possible, even though Tandler's customers were almost exclusively government agencies. So Tandler and her partner founded corporations. Instead of income tax, the cheaper corporate tax was charged.
They chose Grünwald rather than Munich as their company headquarters. The trade tax there was half as high. Instead of a good eight million euros to the state capital, only four million should flow to the community in the south of Munich.
On April 1st, Tandler and N. rented an attic room in Grünwald for their yet-to-be-founded Little Penguin GmbH. On April 6th, they bought three corporate shells, renamed them and contributed their shares, with tax retroactive effect to March 1st.
On April 9, 2020, a PSP tax advisor filled out the “tax registration questionnaire” for Little Penguin GmbH. One of the questions was whether the company had operations in several communities. The consultant checked “No” and sent the form to the Munich tax office. A short time later, the mask company signed a rental agreement and declared its official move to Grünwald.
A year after the start of the pandemic, the million-dollar mask deals became a political scandal. At the end of February 2021, the Bundestag lifted the immunity of CSU MP Georg Nüßlein. The investigators investigated the suspicion that he had received high commissions for arranging mask deals. A few days later it became known that CDU MP Nikolas Löbel's company had also earned around 250,000 euros from arranging masks. Löbel resigned from his Bundestag mandate on March 8th.
Finally, in May, Andrea Tandler and Darius N. came into public focus. Media reported on the millions in commission they received for the Emix business. As a result, it was no longer just journalists who were interested in Little Penguin, but also the investigative authorities.
On June 16, 2021, the Munich District Court issued a search warrant against Tandler, N. and a PSP tax advisor. Eight days later, on June 24th, the investigators arrived. That day, another PSP lawyer came into focus.
The lawyer accompanied the search and became the investigators' contact person. His law firm partner, who was accused by the investigators, had instructed him to pick up items confiscated after the raid. But Tandler and N. had also instructed the lawyer.
This is exactly what Tandler's lawyers see today as an irresolvable conflict of interest - and a betrayal of the party. On the one hand, the PSP lawyer helped the tax advisor from his own office, against whom one of the search warrants was directed. On the other hand, he had a mandate from the two mask dealers who later came to court in the same matter.
On December 13, 2022, the Munich I public prosecutor's office discontinued the proceedings against the PSP tax advisor. Six weeks later, arrest warrants were issued against Tandler and N. Both were arrested on January 24, 2023.
In prison, N.'s distrust grew. On February 2, 2023, he asked his daughter to contact an independent defense attorney. The choice fell on the criminal lawyer Katharina Dierlamm. On August 18, 2023, N. PSP terminated the mandate in writing and prohibited any further interference in his criminal case. But on the day of the termination, a PSP lawyer is said to have again offered himself as a contact person.
On September 13, 2023, PSP placed an order with the law firm YPOG on behalf of Tandlers Little Penguin GmbH. It is said today that some of the questions were not agreed with Tandler's defense attorney Sabine Stetter, including those about trade tax - one of the topics that was the focus of the indictment.
The main hearing before the 6th Commercial Criminal Chamber began on October 4, 2023, Tandler and N. were charged with evading income and trade tax. Two weeks later, YPOG sent the result of PSP’s order: “Please find attached the updated trade tax note in two versions.”
The note answered the question about the permanent establishment. As a result, the company also has a business location in Munich, the document said. The information in the questionnaire that Tandler's consultant once made and denied that the company had operating facilities in several communities is not tenable.
It turned out that the landlord rented the 15 square meter Grünwalder Room to 26 other people and companies. The district court viewed it as a classic mailbox address and saw that Tandler and N had intentionally provided false information.
The handling of the YPOG report is the core of Tandler's complaint against her former advisors. Her accusation: PSP is said to have neither informed her and N. nor their defense attorney about this. Instead, an agreement with tax investigators is said to have been pushed forward in October.
According to the indictment, the PSP lawyer, who maintained contact with the investigators, telephoned the associate judge of the criminal chamber on October 27th. The reason was to coordinate the date for the lawyer's upcoming witness hearing. According to the judge's file, the conversation also dealt with questions of sentencing. Tandler's accusation: Her defense attorney Stetter is said to have only found out about this after inspecting the files.
On November 6th, Tandler's lawyer wrote to the chamber that the PSP man was neither a defense attorney nor mandated to discuss sentencing-related issues. The lawyer's testimony came eight days later, but he did not mention the note about the business premises.
On December 5th, the YPOG expert noted internally that PSP had reported an imminent agreement on the question of the operating sites: 90 percent Munich, 10 percent Grünwald. The trade tax report was not completed due to the agreement. On December 13th, YPOG invoiced. The verdict came two days later: four years and five months for Tandler, three years and nine months for N.
On January 2, 2024, Tandler found the invoice for 160,000 euros and requested the documents. The next day she received the draft of the report. According to the criminal complaint, the significance that the paper would have had for the trial that had just ended was not explained to her.
The Federal Court of Justice partially overturned the judgment in April 2025 and discontinued the income tax proceedings. He allowed the conviction for trade tax evasion to stand and three years in prison for Tandler and her business partner. It was precisely on this point that the BGH focused on the incorrect information in the questionnaire dated April 9, 2020.
Tandler's defense attorney Stetter explained that if she had known the findings, they would have immediately presented them as exculpatory evidence. “PSP was informed by me that YPOG’s test results were relevant to Ms. Tandler’s defense in the main hearing and promised to keep the defense informed accordingly,” Stetter told Handelsblatt. “However, PSP did not provide YPOG’s written statements on trade tax to either Ms. Tandler or me.”
Tandler is in poor health and her ability to be held is currently being examined. If she recovers, she would have to go to prison for another year after her ten months in custody. She also wants to prevent that with her criminal complaint.
It remains to be seen whether the public prosecutor's office sees Tandler's allegations against PSP as initial suspicion. The former advisors don't see anyone. “PSP has countered the allegations made with the relevant authorities,” says a spokesman for Tandler’s former law firm. “We will continue to do this.”
