A new book about the “Cum-Ex” case at Hamburg’s Warburg Bank has led to an exchange of blows in the Bundestag about the gaps in memory expressed by Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) in this context. While representatives of the CDU/CSU, Left and AfD questioned the chancellor’s credibility on Thursday and called for further clarification, the SPD, Greens and FDP accused the Union of holding a “shop window debate” that ignored the country’s current challenges.
The Union had registered the current hour under the title of the book “The Scholz Files: The Chancellor, the Money and the Power”, which was published earlier this week. In it, the two investigative journalists Oliver Schröm (ARD “Panorama”) and Oliver Hollenstein (“Manager Magazin”) describe how Scholz obviously still remembered a meeting with the co-owners of Warburg Bank in two surveys on the case in the Bundestag Finance Committee in 2020 of his time as mayor of Hamburg, but nine months later referred to gaps in his memory before the parliamentary investigative committee of the Hamburg Parliament.
“At the same time, he wants to remember very precisely that he had no political influence – a contradiction in terms,” said Matthias Middelberg, interior expert for the Union faction. Scholz’s “silence, his factual refusal to testify in the Warburg case, which has not yet been clarified to this day,” undermines his credibility.
A “parliamentary book review”?
Michael Schrodi from the SPD accused the Union of preoccupying the Bundestag with “insinuations and smoke screens” despite the current crises instead of “the concerns of the citizens”. He pointed out that two committees of inquiry had so far provided no evidence of political influence on the Warburg tax case. “Not a single piece of evidence of political influence is in the files.”
The Green budget politician Sebastian Schäfer saw “a parliamentary book review” in the current hour. The book is well researched, but “as far as I know it doesn’t bring any new insights”.
The financial expert of the AfD, Albrecht Glaser, accused Scholz of initially concealing two of his meetings with the bank shareholders in 2016, as shown in the book. “I myself witnessed such a denial in the finance committee.” Scholz’s strategy leads to disenchantment with democracy “because the political class is not doing its job.”
The left chairman of the finance committee, Christian Görke, asked the SPD to ensure that Scholz “makes himself honest” and answers the questions in the finance committee. The chancellor got “entangled” in contradictions. Representative surveys showed: “Around 70 percent don’t buy his memory gaps.”
Investigations since 2016
During his time as Hamburg mayor, Scholz received the shareholders of Warburg Bank three times in 2016 and 2017. Investigations were already underway in 2016 on suspicion of serious tax evasion in connection with “Cum-Ex” transactions against the bank.
After the first meeting, the Hamburg tax authorities had not raised an originally planned reclaim of 47 million euros from the bank because of wrongly reimbursed capital gains taxes and, according to the opinion at the time, had let it run into the statute of limitations. A second claim for a further 43 million euros was only raised at the end of 2017 on the instructions of the Federal Ministry of Finance to take measures interrupting the statute of limitations.
