Before the Finance Committee of the Bundestag, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD), then Minister of Finance in 2020, made contradictory statements about the so-called “Cum-Ex” affair, according to witnesses.
Fabio de Masi, a former member of the Bundestag for the Left in the Bundestag, said before the Hamburg parliamentary committee of inquiry into the affair that Scholz had initially said about a meeting with Warburg Bank shareholder Christian Olearius: “Due to tax secrecy, he could not comment on the content of the conversation. “
In a second meeting classified as secret on July 1, 2020, Scholz then stated that he only listened passively to the meeting with Olearius on November 10, 2017. Only in a third meeting of the committee on September 9, 2020 did Scholz claim gaps in his memory. De Masi said he felt cheated as a member of the finance committee.
According to the memory of the CSU member of the Bundestag Sebastian Brehm, Scholz said at the first meeting of the finance committee on March 4, 2020 that everything was already known through media reports and that he could claim to have acted correctly. Because of tax secrecy, he could not provide any further information. “I found that contradictory,” Brehm said.
Since only memoirs and no verbatim minutes were taken of the finance committee meetings, the Hamburg committee members hoped for clarification from the Berlin MPs present at the time as to whether Scholz’s statements about the meetings were still based on his own active memories. The first 15 of over 30 committee members at the time were invited for Friday. Three canceled due to illness.
Scholz has always rejected such allegations
The Hamburg investigative committee is to examine whether leading Hamburg SPD politicians have influenced the tax treatment of the Warburg Bank. Scholz, who was mayor of Hamburg at the time in question, has always rejected such allegations.
After the first meeting with the Warburg bankers in Hamburg City Hall, the tax office for large companies initially waived tax reclaims in the amount of 47 million euros against the financial institution when the statute of limitations expired in 2016. A further 43 million euros were only requested in 2017 on the instructions of the Federal Ministry of Finance shortly before the statute of limitations began.
According to CSU MP Brehm, the letter from the Federal Ministry was delivered on November 8, 2017, shortly before Scholz and Olearius met. After that there was a discussion between the Ministry and the Hamburg tax authorities about the legality of the tax reclaim. The letter was then sent to the Hamburg authorities again in December.
Warburg Bank later had to repay more than 176 million euros in unjustly refunded taxes due to a court order, but is still trying to take legal action against the changed tax assessments.
The Union in the Bundestag wants to clarify many open points from their point of view in another committee of inquiry into the tax affair. That could be formally decided at a parliamentary group meeting next week. In the Bundestag, the CDU and CSU alone have at least a quarter of the votes required to convene a committee of inquiry.
