Dhe Federal Chancellor comes into the hall of the Hamburg Parliament. A smile, handshakes, Olaf Scholz (SPD) knows all this very well here. He takes a seat on the Senate bench, in the chair he once occupied as First Mayor. This time there is a different sign in front of him: “Olaf Scholz, witness”. For the second time, the Social Democrat testified before the Hamburg investigative committee on the Cum-ex affair on Friday, and that also has something to do with his time as mayor of the Hanseatic city until March 2018.
The committee wants to find out whether there was any political interference in the decision by the city’s tax authorities to refrain from recovering 47 million euros from the Warburg bank involved in the cum-ex scandal at the end of 2016. In the following year, the Federal Ministry of Finance had to intervene so that a further repayment of 43 million euros did not have to be waived. And Scholz, like his first statement in April last year, sticks to the line: there was no political influence on the decision. He has no concrete recollection of any decisive meetings with representatives of the bank’s top management in 2016 and 2017.
For a long time, the committee’s work has focused primarily on the fall of 2016 and the talks between Scholz and Warburg representatives. They had only become known because they had been noted in the diary of one of the bankers. After one of the talks, Scholz called the banker and told him to forward a paper with the bank’s arguments against the recovery to the finance senator. That was his party friend Peter Tschentscher, who is now Hamburg’s first mayor – and also denies any political influence.
Scholz can not be disturbed
When he received the document from the bank, he noted the request for information on the situation and forwarded it. The decision was made a little later. Shortly before Scholz was questioned, new details were added to these long-known details. Like the good 200,000 euros found during a search by the Cologne public prosecutor’s office in the safe deposit box of former Hamburg SPD MP Johannes Kahrs. Or about the “diabolical plan” that an important tax official is said to have written in a private chat message shortly after the waiver.
Scholz, however, obviously cannot upset all of this. Already in his introduction he makes it clear that from his point of view everything is clear. He cites press reports on the work and statements in the committee, and the facts seem clear. Other assumptions are “wrong and are clearly not supported by anything or anyone”. He also says: “I cherish the faint hope that assumptions and insinuations will stop.” It had become clear that they lacked any basis.
As with his first statement, Scholz repeats that he has no personal memories of the meetings and the phone call with the banker. However, he also states that he is generally extraordinarily reserved in such talks and promises nothing. Three meetings with representatives of a Hamburg bank did not seem unusual to him. He also met with representatives of other Hamburg banks without having any concrete memories of it. Nowhere is there even the slightest indication that he had given promises. A member of parliament asks Scholz when he will start exerting political influence. “If you work towards a political decision,” he says.
In the question and answer session, the opposition MPs once again made clear their doubts about the chancellor’s ability to remember, but they roll off him. After all, he can remember greeting Kahrs for the last time on the asparagus tour of the Seeheimer Kreis, which is an association of conservative SPD MPs. When a CDU member of parliament asked him whether he would undergo hypnosis to retrieve the buried knowledge, Scholz thanks him for doing the “caricature of the survey” here himself. After three and a half hours it’s all over. Shortly before the end, Scholz says: “It’s time to say, okay, there was nothing.”
