Joint and several liability for the forfeiture of the value of criminal proceeds in a criminal revision

The German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) rejected the defendant's revision as unfounded, thereby upholding the Landgericht Frankfurt am Main's conviction and sentence from January 18, 2022, while amending the judgment to explicitly order that the defendant bears joint and several liability for the forfeiture of the value equivalent of criminal proceeds; consequently, the defendant prevailed in no aspects and bore the costs of the legal remedy. The case involved a criminal appeal challenging a lower court's decision regarding the forfeiture (Einziehung) of illicit gains, specifically addressing the scope of liability for the value replacement of such proceeds. The decisive legal basis centered on the interpretation of forfeiture provisions under the German Criminal Code, clarifying that the statutory obligation to repay the value of criminal property extends to joint and several liability among co-defendants or responsible parties, thus correcting a procedural or substantive gap in the lower court's enforcement order without altering the underlying guilty verdict.