Jürgen Roth

Jürgen Roth  link Website (Investigative journalist, Author)
Born	4 November 1945 Frankfurt on Main
Died	28 September 2017 Frankfurt on Main
Nationality	German
Interests	organized crime, white collar crime
German investigative journalist who has published many books on organized crime.

Jürgen Roth was a German publicist and investigative journalist. After graduating from high school, Roth completed an apprenticeship as a freight forwarder. He left the occupation and spent a year in Turkey in 1968. Since 1971, he has published books and television documentaries on organized crime with a focus on Eastern Europe, Germany and international terrorism. He was also active in the organization Business Crime Control. Roth was of the opinion that organized crime was deeply intertwined with the economic system and that it was an integral part of economic life in Europe. Roth died after a serious illness in September 2017 at the age of 71.

Reception and legal proceedings

The Rheinische Post sees Roth as one of the "best experts on the subject". However, he is considered a "contentious and, due to his polemics, controversial journalist," according to the Berliner Zeitung. Thomas Feltes, criminologist at the Ruhr University Bochum, wrote about his publications: "Without his books, the common reader would miss something, and certainly also some investigators who, after publication, will greedily search for who is quoted, named or otherwise indirectly mentioned there".

There were several court cases against Roth because of his publications. Gerhard Schröder took legal action against his 2006 book: Der Deutschland-Clan: Das skrupellose Netzwerk aus Politikern, Top-Managern und Justiz (The German clan: The unscrupulous network of politicians, top managers and the judiciary), in which Roth also dealt with the former Federal Chancellor. The court ruled that Roth had to rewrite a passage in the book in which he linked Schröder's trip to the United Arab Emirates with his work for Gazprom. However, Schröder's lawyers also tried to prevent the sale of the new, unobjected edition by issuing warnings to booksellers. Roth had presented an excerpt of his research activities in advance on the news portal Fair Observer.

Following a temporary injunction obtained by the lawyer of a Leipzig restaurateur at the Leipzig Regional Court, the 2009 book Mafialand Deutschland (Mafia country Germany) had to be withdrawn from bookstores and could then only be sold with redacted passages.

In February 2010, former Bulgarian Interior Minister Rumen Petkov sued Jürgen Roth for defamation after Roth had linked Petkov to the mafia and illegal drug trafficking. On October 14, 2010, Roth was acquitted by the Sofia District Court and the charge of defamation was dismissed.

Sachsensumpf

From summer 2007, Roth wrote about the Sachsensumpf (allegations of membership in mafia structures among high-ranking politicians, lawyers, police officers and journalists). Roth was severely criticized by the journalist Reiner Burger, who described the Sachsensumpf as a legend, in a series of articles in the FAZ. Burger also justified the criticism with past lost court cases; according to Burger, Roth was sentenced to damages by the Hamburg District Court in 2000 for his book: Die graue Eminenz (The gray eminence) published in 1999 and for a television report in 1999. Among other things, Burger accused Roth of failing to speak directly to the people concerned. In this context, Roth had to retract statements on his homepage about a Leipzig entrepreneur. The witness to whom he had referred had told an untruth and Roth was sentenced to a fine of 4,200 euros by the Dresden district court in spring 2008. The investigative committee of the Saxon state parliament did not come to a clear conclusion about the "Sachsensumpf" in 2009. The CDU and FDP consider it to be disproven, while the Greens and Left Party claim to have found no evidence, as the committee of inquiry was largely denied access to files by the state government. The public prosecutor's office did not investigate further.

Roth defended himself by saying that he had only questioned the person directly in one case for a blog entry and criticized Burger's attacks as "Kafkaesque" because, among other things, Burger ignored the fact that important witnesses in the "Sachsensumpf" were put under pressure. Burger did receive the "Sächsische Verfassungsmedaille" (Saxonian Constitutional Medal) in 2009, which is is awarded by the Free State of Saxony to persons who have rendered outstanding services to the liberal democratic development of the Free State.

References

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