fine

Which translation, when

Why

German fines run on two tracks and the company track is narrower than English readers expect. The criminal fine is die Geldstrafe, § 40 StGB, a day-fine system, the number of Tagessätze measures guilt, the rate of each measures income, and it reaches natural persons only. The administrative fine is die Geldbuße, § 17 OWiG, the currency of regulators, cartel authorities and, by the regulation’s own German text, of GDPR enforcement, Art. 83 DSGVO. Companies live entirely on this second track, Germany to date has no corporate criminal law, the corporate sanction is die Verbandsgeldbuße, § 30 OWiG, often reached through supervision failures, § 130 OWiG, which is why compliance memos care about both provisions. The contractual penalty, finally, is a private creature with its own name, die Vertragsstrafe, and fine there would confuse the state’s money with the parties’ own. The verbs follow the track, eine Geldbuße wird verhängt, eine Geldstrafe verhängt das Strafgericht.

Typical mistakes

• Geldstrafe gegen die GmbH beschreibt ein Ding, das es nicht gibt, Germany to date has no corporate criminal law, the company’s sanction is die Verbandsgeldbuße, § 30 OWiG.
• GDPR fines are Geldbußen, Art. 83 DSGVO, the regulation’s own German word, and Strafen there imports criminal law into an administrative regime.
• The day-fine system resists literal maths, a Geldstrafe of ninety Tagessätze is not a fixed sum, the count measures guilt and the daily rate income, § 40 StGB, so converting fines across systems needs both numbers.

What matters

Compliance reports translate the sanction by regime: the cartel authority’s fine is die Geldbuße, the data authority’s die DSGVO-Geldbuße, Art. 83, both reachable for the company only as Verbandsgeldbuße, § 30 OWiG, often via the supervision rule of § 130 OWiG, while die Geldstrafe waits for the individual manager in the criminal file, § 40 StGB. The report that fines the company criminally has invented a German statute.

Examples