HAMBURG (dpa-AFX) – Hamburg’s first mayor Peter Tschentscher will be questioned on Friday (from 2 p.m.) by the Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry (PUA) of the citizenship on the “Cum-Ex” scandal. With him, an employee of the tax office for large companies is invited as a witness to the 30th session of the PUA. The committee is to clarify whether leading SPD politicians had any influence on the tax treatment of the Warburg Bank, which was involved in the “Cum-Ex” scandal, when Tschentscher was still Senator for Finance in the Hanseatic city.
The background to this is meetings between the then mayor and current Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the co-owners of the bank, Max Warburg and Christian Olearius, in 2016 and 2017. Olearius was already under investigation at the time on suspicion of serious tax evasion.
After the first meeting, the tax office for large companies initially waived additional tax claims of 47 million euros when the statute of limitations expired in 2016. A further 43 million euros were only requested in 2017 after the intervention of the Federal Ministry of Finance.
Scholz admitted to the meetings when he was questioned by the investigative committee, but stated that he could not remember the content of the talks. However, he ruled out any influence on the tax procedure. Tschentscher, who succeeded Scholz as mayor in 2018, has repeatedly rejected such allegations./fi/DP/ngu