Chancellor Olaf Scholz once again rejected any influence on the tax proceedings of the Warburg Bank, which was involved in the “Cum-Ex” scandal, before the investigative committee of the Hamburg Parliament. “I had no influence on the Warburg tax procedure,” said the former mayor of Hamburg on Friday during his second hearing before the committee.
“The tax process was not influenced by politics,” Scholz continued. He says this “again very clearly”. The allegations are “conjectures and insinuations”, criticized Scholz. These assumptions are “wrong and are clearly not supported by anything or anyone”. The SPD politician emphasized that he had no detailed knowledge of the tax procedure in question in the financial administration during his time as mayor and finance minister.
The core of the committee is the question of whether he or other leading SPD politicians have influenced the tax treatment of the bank.
The background to this is three meetings between Scholz – then still the mayor of Hamburg – and the shareholders of Warburg Bank, Christian Olearius and Max Warburg, in 2016 and 2017. Scholz admitted to the meetings during his first interrogation, but stated that he did not follow the content of the conversation to remember more.
According to Olearius, after the first meeting, Scholz recommended sending a letter of defense from the bank to the then finance senator and current mayor Peter Tschentscher (SPD), in which the reclaim of 47 million euros in capital gains tax that had been wrongly reimbursed was presented as unjustified.
