Hamburg’s former mayor and today’s SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz was obviously informed about the preliminary investigations by the public prosecutor in the “Cum-Ex” scandal against him. At least one lawyer for the German Chancellor has repeatedly urged the Hamburg authorities to discontinue the proceedings, as can be seen from the response of the red-green Senate to a “small inquiry” from the CDU parliamentary group to the German press agency.
However, Scholz had not been officially informed of the proceedings that had since been discontinued. The “Manager Magazin” reported on it first on Wednesday.
“I wonder how Scholz got wind of the investigation at all if the public prosecutor hadn’t informed him at all,” said CDU member Richard Seelmaecker. Apparently there is a leak in the Hamburg judiciary. According to the Senate, Scholz was never given a fair hearing in the preliminary investigation because there were insufficient factual indications of the existence of a criminal offense. The public prosecutor has stated in the past that Scholz was not included in the preliminary investigation and that his environment was not informed.
According to the Senate, a lawyer for the then candidate for chancellor had approached the public prosecutor for the first time on March 17, 2021 and legitimized himself as the latter’s legal representative. On April 22nd, he then sent a brief requesting the immediate termination of the proceedings. Further pleadings with the same request followed on July 5th and August 5th.
The preliminary investigations that began in February 2020 were discontinued, among other things because of suspected breach of trust, according to the Senate on September 7th – three weeks before the German federal election – “because, in the opinion of the public prosecutor, there were no sufficient actual indications of the existence of a criminal offense” – a Assessment that the Public Prosecutor’s Office followed in its appeal decision of November 29th.
Eight days after the lawyer first appeared, Scholz had testified as a witness in the parliamentary “Cum-Ex” investigation committee of the Hamburg citizenship. The committee would like to clarify a possible political influence of leading SPD politicians on the tax treatment of the Warburg Bank. The background to this are meetings between the then Hamburg Mayor Scholz and the Warburg owners Max Warburg and Christian Olearius, who was already being investigated on suspicion of serious tax evasion.
In the committee, Scholz stated that he could not remember the content of the discussions. But he ruled out any influence. After the 2016 meeting, the Hamburg tax authorities waived additional tax claims for 2009 and 2010 in the amount of EUR 47 million against the bank after the limitation period had expired. Another 43 million euros were only requested in 2017 after the German Ministry of Finance intervened.
In “cum-ex” deals, financial actors used a sophisticated game of confusion to have the tax authorities reimburse capital gains tax that was never paid. For this purpose, shares with (“cum”) and without (“ex”) dividend entitlements were pushed back and forth in large packages around the cut-off date for the distribution in quick succession until no one had an overview. The profits have been split. The Warburg Bank now had to repay 176 million euros to the tax authorities, but continues to take legal action against it.
Source: Nachrichten
