HAMBURG (dpa-AFX) – Chancellor Olaf Scholz appeared on Friday for the second time before the parliamentary investigative committee of the Hamburg Parliament on the “Cum-Ex” scandal. At the core of the recent interrogation of the SPD politician as a witness, the question should again be whether he or other leading SPD politicians had any influence on the tax treatment of the Warburg Bank involved in the scandal. Scholz denies this.
The background to this are three meetings between Scholz – then 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.
Tschentscher had forwarded the letter with the “request for information on the situation” to the tax authorities, where, contrary to original plans, they decided a short time later to let the claim run into the statute of limitations. A further claim for 43 million euros was raised a year later shortly before the statute of limitations expired and on the instructions of the Federal Ministry of Finance.
Tschentscher had confirmed the forwarding of the letter to the committee. However, the allegation of influence was described as “unfounded”./klm/fi/DP/mis