The Union faction is urging Chancellor Olaf Scholz to be asked again about the Hamburg Cum-Ex scandal in the Bundestag Finance Committee. This emerges from a letter to the committee chairman, which is available to the German Press Agency and which the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” first reported on.
The reason given by parliamentary group leader Mathias Middelberg are contradictory statements by the SPD politician. “The Chancellor is requested to be present,” he writes.
Most recently, the committee had released statements by the then Minister of Finance Scholz from a survey in 2020 that had previously been kept secret. This made the contradictions obvious.
In “cum-ex” transactions, blocks of shares were moved back and forth by several participants around the dividend record date with (“cum”) and without (“ex”) a right to a dividend. As a result, tax offices reimbursed capital gains taxes that had not been paid at all. The state suffered billions in damage.
Scholz does not want to be able to remember
The Hamburg scandal is about the Warburg Bank. A committee of inquiry is to clarify whether leading SPD politicians had any influence on the tax treatment of the bank during Scholz’s time as Hamburg mayor.
At the end of 2016, the tax authorities waived a repayment of 47 million euros against the bank. According to the bank, it was only after a court ruling that it settled all outstanding tax reclaims in 2020, but is still trying to get the money back through legal channels.
Scholz first reported on a conversation with the banker Christian Olearius, but stated in a later survey that he had no concrete memories of such meetings, writes Middelberg. “The rapid amnesia of today’s Federal Chancellor between July 2020 and September 2020 or April 2021 raises considerable questions.”
The Union also had questions about Scholz’s contacts with the then SPD MP Johannes Kahrs, in whose locker investigators found more than 200,000 euros in cash. (dpa)
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