Bankruptcy insolvency: sufficiency of economic-criminal evidentiary indicators over business-economics methodology

The German Federal Court of Criminal Justice (BGH) dismissed the appeals of the defendants as unfounded, upholding the conviction from the Landgericht Hof dated September 25, 2015, and ordering each appellant to bear their own costs. The dispute concerned the criminal offense of bankruptcy (Bankrott) and whether the defendants were insolvent on the statutory reference date of October 31, 2009; although the defendants challenged the lower court's application of a specific business-economics methodology, the court held this issue immaterial because the Landgericht independently established insolvency based on a substantial body of economic-criminal evidence indicators, including an erroneous assessment of the due date for wage tax payments that did not undermine the overall sufficiency of the proof. The decision rests on § 349 Abs. 2 StPO regarding the dismissal of unfounded revisions and the legal doctrine that insolvency can be proven through a combination of evidentiary indicators sufficient to establish the state of inability to pay debts.