HAMBURG (dpa-AFX) – Irritation in the “Cum-Ex” investigative committee of the Hamburg citizenship over the interim whereabouts of two laptops with thousands upon thousands of presumably explosive emails: They were originally stored in a safe in a room specially set up for confidential committee documents. The devices are now in other “safe rooms”. The head of the working staff, Steffen Jänicke (SPD), explained this on Friday at the meeting of the representatives, said CDU chairman Richard Seelmaecker to the German Press Agency. However, in the evening, the SPD chairman in the committee, Milan Pein, called Seelmaecker’s statements that the laptops were now back in the safe false. They are still in a secured cupboard in Jänicke’s office.
The chairman of the investigative committee, Mathias Petersen (SPD), dismissed speculation that the chief investigator Steffen Jänicke, appointed by the SPD, had hidden the laptops as “complete nonsense”. He told the dpa that he had only kept them safe because it still needed to be clarified how to deal with the large amounts of data on the laptops, which had nothing to do with the “Cum-Ex” scandal. This was also communicated to the committee chairmen two weeks ago. Petersen spoke of a “storm in a teacup”.
According to reports from “Stern” and “WAZ”, there are more than 700,000 emails on the two laptops, including from Olaf Scholz’s office manager Jeanette Schwammberger, Hamburg’s mayor Peter Tschentscher (SPD) and numerous top officials. They were confiscated by the Cologne public prosecutor’s office as part of the investigation into the “Cum-Ex” scandal and, after a long political tug-of-war, handed over to the investigative committee.
The committee is supposed to examine possible influence by leading Hamburg SPD politicians on the tax treatment of the Warburg Bank. The background is three meetings between the bank co-owners Christian Olearius and Max Warburg with the then mayor and current Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) in 2016 and 2017./klm/DP/nas