Ein a new book about the “Cum-Ex” case of the Hamburg Warburg Bank has led to an exchange of blows in the Bundestag about the memory gaps expressed by Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) in this context. While representatives of the CDU/CSU, Left and AfD questioned the chancellor’s credibility on Thursday and called for further clarification, the SPD, Greens and FDP accused the Union of holding a “shop window debate” that ignored the country’s current challenges.
The Union had registered the current hour under the title of the book published earlier this week, “The Scholz Files: The Chancellor, the Money and the Power”. In it, the two investigative journalists Oliver Schröm (ARD “Panorama”) and Oliver Hollenstein (“Manager Magazin”) describe how Scholz obviously still remembered a meeting with the co-owners of Warburg Bank in two surveys on the case in the Bundestag Finance Committee in 2020 of his time as mayor of Hamburg, but nine months later referred to gaps in his memory before the parliamentary investigative committee of the Hamburg Parliament.
“At the same time, he wants to remember very precisely that he had no political influence – a contradiction in terms,” said Matthias Middelberg, interior expert for the Union faction. Scholz’s “silence, his factual refusal to testify in the Warburg affair, which has not been clarified to this day,” undermines his credibility.
SPD speaks of smoke candles
Michael Schrodi from the SPD accused the Union of preoccupying the Bundestag with “insinuations and smokescreens” despite the current crises instead of “with the concerns of the citizens”. He pointed out that two committees of inquiry had so far provided no evidence of political influence on the Warburg tax case. “Not a single piece of evidence of political influence is in the files.”
The Green budget politician Sebastian Schäfer saw “a parliamentary book review” in the current hour. The book is well researched, but “as far as I know it doesn’t bring any new insights”.
The financial expert of the AfD, Albrecht Glaser, accused Scholz, as shown in the book, of initially concealing two of his meetings with the bank shareholders in 2016. “I myself was a witness to such denials in the finance committee.” Scholz’s strategy leads to disenchantment with democracy, “because the political class does not fulfill its tasks”.
The left chairman of the finance committee, Christian Görke, asked the SPD to ensure that Scholz “makes himself honest” and answers the questions in the finance committee. The chancellor got “entangled” in contradictions. Representative surveys showed: “Around 70 percent don’t buy his memory gaps.”
During his time as Hamburg mayor, Scholz received the Warburg Bank shareholders three times in 2016 and 2017. Investigations into suspected serious tax evasion in connection with “cum-ex” transactions against the bank were already underway in 2016.
After the first meeting, the Hamburg tax authorities had not raised an originally planned reclaim of 47 million euros from the bank because of wrongly reimbursed capital gains taxes and, according to the opinion at the time, had let it run into the statute of limitations. A second claim for a further 43 million euros was only raised at the end of 2017 on the instructions of the Federal Ministry of Finance to take measures interrupting the statute of limitations.
