Hertha BSC: espionage thriller about Lars Windhorst – Sport

It had recently become reasonably quiet around Hertha BSC, at least when measured by the cascade of bizarre messages that have shaped the public image of the club in recent years. Now a smell that is suspected to be new to the Bundesliga and is just as mysterious as it is unpleasant is blowing from a secret service food stall around the capital club.

On Thursday morning, the Berlin Bundesliga soccer club was surprised by a spectacular research that was carried out on the salmon-colored pages of the Financial Times was to read. Court documents would suggest that club investor Lars Windhorst hired a private Israeli intelligence service to oust former President Werner Gegenbauer through an undercover campaign. The Berlin entrepreneur resigned a few months ago after 14 years as Hertha boss. Quite unnerved.

Windhorst, 48, joined Hertha in the summer of 2019 and owns around two-thirds of the club’s professional department. He paid about 374 million euros for the shares. There were no successes: Hertha stayed true to the relegation battle. It is well known that Windhorst had a falling out with Gegenbauer over the course of time. At the height of the power struggle that ended in public, Windhorst attacked the then president directly and demanded a fresh start – without counter-builders.

The company “successfully fulfilled” its mission with the resignation of Gegenbauer

The FT has now reported on a lawsuit pending in a Tel Aviv district court that says Windhorst hired an Israeli security firm called Shibumi Strategy Limited to overthrow Gegenbauer. According to a lawsuit filed by Shibumi, a Swiss-based unit of Windhorst’s financial holding company Tennor Group has breached its contract. Shibumi is therefore waiting for a fee of one million euros for eight months of undercover work and an allegedly verbally agreed performance bonus of another four million euros. The company sees its mission through Gegenbauer’s resignation as “successfully accomplished”.

The spokesman for Windhorst’s Holding Tennor called the presentation “complete nonsense”. So far, the whole process has only been known from the FT report. And by the way: “Why should anyone hire an Israeli agency for such a campaign when there are dozens of PR agencies in Germany that don’t call for such horrendous sums.” The Windhorst spokesman added that it was not possible to explain where the newspaper report came from and what the lawsuit was about, and Tennor lawyers are currently researching it.

Windhorst speaks of “nonsense” – the CEO of the security company also denies the events

What makes the process even more puzzling: Ori Gur-Ari, the CEO of Shibumi Strategy, also denies it. “We don’t know anything about this alleged case, you must have made a mistake,” he told the FT. Windhorst also called it “nonsense” to the newspaper and questioned the reliability of the documents. Windhorst said he hadn’t spoken to Gur-Ari “for a long time”. Hertha BSC said: “Tennor has conveyed to us that this story is complete nonsense.”

But the Financial Times claims she got help from the newspaper The Times of Israel can see the documents that were filed with a district court in Tel Aviv three weeks ago. This shows that Windhorst commissioned the Shibumi company to plan and develop a strategy to strengthen its own reputation. In a report published in June 2022, codenamed “Euro 2020,” according to FT, Shibumi explained that a 20-strong team “reached out” supporters, opponents and family members of Gegenbauer – online and in person, openly or covertly – to get information about Gegenbauer and/or fuel your own campaign.

The alleged anti-Gegenbauer repertoire: online campaign, merch and a cartoonist

Shibumi’s actions included an online petition entitled “Gegenbauer raus”. Shibumi also created a series of “online profiles of alleged fans” who criticized Gegenbauer. That matches the research of a Twitter user from the active Hertha fan scene named “@so-called”. As early as November 2021, he had wondered about counter-constructor-critical posts that had been posted almost simultaneously and in a similar diction – by users who had previously had no connection to Hertha.

According to FT, a cartoonist was also paid to create unflattering images of Gegenbauer that were posted on social media. Gegenbauer was depicted as a fierce grim reaper and devil. A website was set up to force the end of Gegenbauer’s term of office, as well as a channel on the short message service Telegram, which flanked the campaign. The “Sportfreax” blog was also set up by Shibumi to spread negative articles about Hertha’s inner state. Shibumi had also planned to distribute merchandising items that read “Gegenbauer raus” before the ultimately canceled November 2021 general meeting.

The FT quotes from alleged emails and text messages from Windhorst in which the investor complained that he had paid “huge sums” with no identifiable results. However, Windhorst acknowledged that Shibumi had successfully uncovered who was behind the “Wundersplat” Twitter account that attacked Windhorst.

Shibumi boss Gur-Ari, in turn, is said to have claimed, according to FT, that Windhorst said at a meeting on a yacht in June 2021 that Shibumi would be able to earn “millions of euros” if the campaign against Gegenbauer was successful. But in the end, the Israeli company worked days and nights for a period of “eight months without being paid”.