Frankfurt, Dec 23: Juergen Schneider, the German property magnate convicted of fraud by a Frankfurt court on Tuesday, said it was not greed but good intentions that motivated him to cheat banks out of billions of marks. From the start of Germany's biggest fraud trial since World War Two, Schneider never denied he had done wrong.

The 63-year-old former property magnate, once the toast of polite society and the darling of the banking community, admitted document forgery to obtain a bank loan and even conceded paying millions of marks in bribes.But throughout the six-month trial, Schneider contended that he had been motivated, not by greed, but by the dream of restoring historic flair to German cities.

His stylish hotels and shopping malls adorned city centres from the banking capital Frankfurt to the east German boom town Leipzig. They were the most elaborately refurbished in the country.

"Some people who know me will say I was possessed. I can hardly contradict that," he told the judge.A Frankfurt district court on Tuesday found Schneider guilty on the charges of fraud and document forgery and sentenced him to six years and nine months in jail.

But even in his closing remarks, Schneider kept the courtroom -- and the German media -- spellbound by his unique sense of style. In pleading to the judge for leniency, he said he would, even if convicted, love to be able to spend Christmas with his family eating his beloved goose dinner.

The collapse of the Schneider group under more than five billion marks of debt in 1994 rocked the real estate market, threatened the livelihoods of hundreds of builders and sparked a public outcry at the ease with which banks let themselves be duped into showering him with money.

It also inspired a feature film called "Peanuts," inreference to an injudicious remark by Hilmar Kopper, the former chief executive of Schneider's main creditor Deutsche Bank AG.

Kopper drew criticism on himself and his bank by dismissing as "peanuts" 50 million marks Schneider owed builders and craftsmen.

The term, which seems destined to haunt Deutsche for a longtime to come, was seen as reinforcing the bank's image as aloof and more interested in big business than small customers.

In his heyday, Schneider ruled his empire with an iron fist -- builders working for him knew him to be a ruthless bargainer -- from a palatial villa in the rolling hills of Koenigstein outside Frankfurt. The wrought iron fence surrounding it was tipped with gold leaf.Sporting his trademark toupee, Schneider, who once worked as a bricklayer, prided himself on having earned a doctorate and insisted on being addressed as "Dr Schneider" at news conferences called to show off his latest high-profile project.But that all came crashing down one day in 1994. Schneider fled Germany with his wife Claudia in 1994 shortly before his company went bankrupt. They were arrested in May the following year in Miami, Florida, where they had been posing as a retired couple.

His sharpness of mind was evident though in his success in embarrassing his creditor banks, especially Deutsche Bank.Senior executives from the bank, including Kopper, now supervisory board chairman, were called to testify and conceded serious mistakes in the way they checked loans to him.For years, warnings about his creditworthiness were ignored. On occasion, his loan applications blatantly overstated the rental income his properties could generate.

The loan checks were so rudimentary that at one point judge Heinrich Gehrke said they made his hair stand on end.he banks, Schneider said, bankrolled a business they knew to be highly speculative and turned a blind eye towards irregularities in his loan applications because they, like he, expected the projects to make money.

All went well for several years but during the early 1990s Schneider's borrowing snowballed. When the market declined, he found himself unable to keep up his loan repayments and his group slid into bankruptcy.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.