The German former spy Werner Mauss has been given a two-year suspended sentence and ordered to donate €200,000 (£180,000) to charity after he was convicted of tax evasion.

The 77-year-old, who has been called the German James Bond, was found guilty of stashing undeclared assets in offshore accounts and shortchanging the state of millions in taxes between 2002 and 2011.

For at least three decades, Mauss, also known as “Institution M”, was a rogue operator who moved between the criminal underworld and intelligence agencies, entrapping drug dealers, retrieving stolen goods, negotiating with terrorists and often changing identity mid-flight on his private plane.

From 1970 to 1996, Mauss’s name was mentioned in connection with almost every major criminal case in West Germany. According to a biography by the journalist Stefan Aust, he claimed to have orchestrated the arrest of no fewer than 162 diamond smugglers, burglars and drug dealers between June 1970 and May 1971 alone.

The judge Markus van den Hoevel said he took into account Mauss’s “impressive life achievement” in handing down the sentence, which fell far short of the six years and three months’ imprisonment sought by the prosecutor.



Mauss had denied the charges and claimed the accounts were set up to channel funds used in operations to free hostages. His lawyers claimed the former agent was unable to mount a proper defence because he was still bound by confidentiality agreements linked to his decades of undercover work.

Investigators began investigating Mauss after one of his aliases was found among names of UBS account holders on a CD the state of North-Rhine Westphalia had purchased from a whistleblower. Mauss had apparently failed to declare an account held with a Luxembourg subsidiary of UBS.

He was briefly detained in late 2012 before making a €4m payment to the tax office. He also paid bail of €1m, according to the indictment read out in court.

After the UBS revelation, his name subsequently emerged in connection with several shell companies listed in the Panama Papers – leaked documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca that exposed the murky offshore financial dealings of the rich and famous.

On his website, Mauss says he was “involved in the smashing of more than one hundred criminal groups and in the arrests of around 2,000 individuals” during his long career.

He claims to have helped negotiate the release of hostages in Colombia, and boasts of tracking down 41 barrels of toxic waste that had gone missing after an explosion at a chemical plant in Italy in 1976.