The Cum-Ex affair follows the former mayor of Hamburg to the Chancellery. To what extent is Scholz involved in the dubious stock deals? In order to clarify the question, the public prosecutor's office searched his mailboxes in the spring, as is now known.
The investigations into the illegal cum-ex transactions of banks and possible beneficiaries are spreading ever further - and have now also reached the political top of the republic. According to information from the "Hamburger Abendblatt", e-mails from the former Mayor of Hamburg and current Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz were searched in the spring.
According to documents available to members of the Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry (PUA) on Cum Ex in Hamburg, the District Court of Cologne issued a search warrant for the mailbox olaf.scholz@sk.hamburg.de on March 30, 2022. That was Scholz's official mailbox when he was mayor. According to a court order, e-mails, calendar entries and attachments from this mailbox have been checked by the IT service provider Dataport since January 1, 2015.
The search was therefore about the question of whether and how politics influenced the decision made in November 2016 to waive a tax reclaim of 47 million euros against Warburg Bank in the context of cum-ex transactions. In addition, the search would have been related to the investigations into Johannes Kahrs, a member of the SPD for many years. He is suspected of favoritism and aiding and abetting tax evasion. More than 200,000 euros in cash were found in a safe deposit box at Kahrs.
As against Kahrs, the former SPD Interior Senator Alfons Pawelczyk and a tax officer responsible for the Warburg Bank at the time are also being investigated for favoritism. According to the information, the files of the public prosecutor's office also contain a Whatsapp message in which this officer tells a colleague about a "diabolical plan" that has worked. This message was sent a few hours after the decision of the tax authorities, contrary to original plans, to let a tax reclaim of 47 million euros against the Warburg Bank statute of limitations.
Chancellor Scholz has so far denied any political influence in the case, but referred to gaps in his memory of his meetings with the shareholder of Warburg Bank. Scholz is scheduled to testify again before the committee on Friday next week. Before that, four former employees of the tax authorities are to be questioned as witnesses, including the former head of the tax administration and the department head previously responsible for the Warburg Bank involved in the scandal.
