CDU and leftists in the Hamburg Parliament have great expectations of the second hearing of Chancellor Olaf Scholz before the committee of inquiry into the “Cum-Ex” scandal this Friday.
“I expect from Mr. Scholz that he finally unpacks and makes a clean sweep,” said the chairman of the CDU, Richard Seelmaecker, the German Press Agency. Nobody believes in the memory gaps that the chancellor refers to in connection with meetings with the shareholders of the Warburg Bank involved in the scandal when he was mayor of Hamburg.
The committee is to clarify possible influence of leading SPD politicians on the tax treatment of the bank. It is about claims of many millions of euros, which the Hamburg tax authorities had initially statute-barred in 2016.
He expects Scholz to answer the questions truthfully and precisely “and not rumble or evade,” said Seelmaecker. “Unlike in other situations, he is obliged to tell the truth in the committee of inquiry.”
“The time when Scholz cheated
According to information from the committee, a corresponding suspicion emerges from the investigation files transmitted by the Cologne public prosecutor’s office. “Should this suspicion be confirmed, it would be another serious scandal,” said Hackbusch.
The AfD committee members, Alexander Wolf and Krzysztof Walczak, expect “not much” from the survey on Friday. “In the usual practice, the Federal Chancellor will no longer remember anything interesting,” they declared.
SPD chairman Milan Pein pointed out that the allegations had not yet been confirmed in the committee. “More than 50 witnesses from different offices, authorities and departments made it very clear, independently of one another, that there was no political influence on Warburg Bank’s tax procedure.”
The chancellor himself has already dampened expectations of his statement. Scholz said in his summer press conference that the committee had not found any evidence of influence since it was set up at the end of 2020. “I am sure that this knowledge will not be changed,” said Scholz.
The Union parliamentary group in the Bundestag wants to follow the Chancellor’s statement “with great attention”, according to parliamentary group leader Mathias Middelberg (CDU). “Depending on the quality and credibility of the statement, we will decide whether Olaf Scholz should also be invited to the finance committee of the German Bundestag for questioning,” Middelberg told the “Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung”.
So-called cum-ex deals refer to moving shares around a dividend record date in order to get a refund of capital gains tax that was not paid. The state lost billions as a result of these practices by banks.
Most recently, NDR, “Stern” and “Manager Magazin” reported on Wednesday that the e-mails of Scholz’s office manager, Jeanette Schwamberger, were searched in connection with the Cum-Ex scandal in April. The corresponding search warrant came from the District Court of Cologne.
The public prosecutor’s office classified one of the messages as “potentially relevant evidence” because it “suggests considerations about deleting data”.
