Olaf Scholz: This public prosecutor puts the chancellor in need of explanation

It is quite possible that Chancellor Olaf Scholz has secretly cursed Anne Brorhilker’s stubbornness these days. Because the fact that Scholz had to give information about his meetings with the owner of the Hamburg Warburg Bank, Christian Olearius, for the second time today before the Parliamentary Investigative Committee (Pua) in Hamburg, he owes largely to the bite and commitment of a senior public prosecutor from Cologne .

Visibly annoyed by the many inquiries, Scholz had pityed a few days ago in the federal press conference that he was “human enough” that he would be happy if “one or the other had the heart” to admit that in two and a half years there would be investigations nothing was found out. Scholz’s message is clear: it’s time to draw the line.

But this final line will probably not come any time soon. At least not when Anne Brorhilker has her way. The 49-year-old prosecutor from Cologne got the Cum-Ex investigations rolling in 2013. And it was she who had carried out the search of the Warburg Bank and the private property of its owner Christian Olearius, during which, among other things, the banker’s diary was seized. This includes: records of Olearius’ meetings with the then Mayor Olaf Scholz and other SPD politicians, who have repeatedly put Scholz in need of explanations.

Investigations in Olaf Scholz’s closest circle are attributable to Brorhilker

Brorhilker, a native of Westphalia whose petite physique doesn’t necessarily show her fighting spirit, is something like the face of the state in the fight against organized tax evasion in Germany. She has long since brought charges against Olearius. The investigations of e-mails in Scholz’s closest environment, via which the star exclusively reported are her account. Scholz herself, which is important to her and her authority to emphasize, is not the subject of her investigation.

One would like to know what drives her, what gives her the strength to act as David against an army of highly paid lawyers from financial groups worth billions. But Brorhilker has decided to seal off her private life to a large extent. Her agency doesn’t even want to give out a CV. Photos of her are rare.

The little that one knows about her (or thinks one knows) comes from the worth-seeing Darin to see: a cheerful woman with an unmistakably Westphalian tongue, who formulates clear and refreshing. “If theft is forbidden, theft is forbidden!”, she says and describes the hair-splitting attempts of the other side to find a loophole again and again: “If you say: Theft from handbags is forbidden, then they come and say: ‘But there it is not from red handbags'”.

She is sitting alone in a small office, with files piled up around her. The computer she is looking at appears to be a few years old. A poster by American photographer Robert Adams hangs on the wall behind her. Slowly and with concentration, she clicks through digital documents, writes notes and rolls through thick Leitz folders. In comparison to the modern skyscrapers, behind whose glass facades the cum-ex business took place, the ambience seems unadorned, almost conservative.

Anne Brorhilker: a feminine form of Inspector Columbo

Brorhilker is probably quite right that many tend to underestimate the smiling woman. The “Zeit” once wrote aptly that Brorhilker was a female version of Inspector Columbo: easy to underestimate, but hard to shake off.

“There are no games with Anne Brorhilker,” the lawyer of one of the accused once described. The fact that the other side initially thought she was small and harmless, she sometimes took advantage of, she admits and describes mockingly how she and her team of five, six Employees have been confronted with almost a hundred highly paid lawyers on the other side during searches.For Brorhilker, this was clearly an attempt to intimidate “to put us in reserve through sheer presence”.

But at the latest when she and her authority coordinated a worldwide raid in 14 countries and 130 buildings in 2014, the underestimation was probably over. Brorhilker had pallets of material secured and came across documents from the Frankfurt tax attorney Hanno Berger. Berger is considered the mastermind behind the cum-ex deals, and he is currently being tried at the Bonn Regional Court.

Brorhilker also celebrated her most important legal success to date in Bonn. A test case, which was observed by the financial sector worldwide, dealt with the criminal investigation of the scandal. The verdict of the district court was clear: Cum-Ex is illegal. In 2021, the judgment was confirmed by the BGH. A great victory for Brorhilker and her team, which probably brought her undesired popularity: The US media company Bloomberg included Brorhilker as the only German in the “Bloomberg 50”, a list honoring people and institutions who are responsible for the global economy are of particular importance.

Since Brorhilker stumbled upon the complex cum-ex scam in 2013, with which banks, companies and shareholders cheated the state out of billions of taxpayers’ money, the fight against the masterminds has become something like her life’s work. And the fight keeps getting bigger. The chief public prosecutor is now investigating more than 80 criminal proceedings against around 1,000 suspects, including Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank and Warburg-Bank. Investigations that have repeatedly put Olaf Scholz in the spotlight.

Brorhilker knows the investigative committee of the Hamburg Parliament from his own experience. She too had answered questions from the deputies as a witness. And there she bluntly put on record what she herself thinks of the passive handling of the Hamburg tax authorities with the private bank MM Warburg: “I only know from scaffolding that bogus invoices are written from private bank to private bank.”