Federal Finance Minister Olaf Scholz (SPD) testifies on Monday in front of the Bundestag Finance Committee. Scholz appeared personally in front of the MPs. The special session of the committee deals with the investigation against the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) and the associated raids by the Osnabrück public prosecutor in the Federal Ministry of Finance and Justice. The FIU is the money laundering special unit of the customs and is subordinate to the Federal Ministry of Finance. Scholz is supposed to provide information about the search in his ministry.
The FDP, the Greens and the Left had requested the special session after the raids in the federal ministries. The background to the searches 17 days before the Bundestag election are investigations against employees of the FIU who allegedly did not forward information on terrorist financing in good time. The FDP, the Greens and the Left now want to speak in the committee about what they consider to be glaring grievances at the FIU – including its personnel and technical structure and lack of access rights to databases.
In this context, the investigators wanted to view documents from both ministries, including emails between the FIU and the Ministry of Finance and correspondence between the two ministries. According to the Ministry of Justice, the Osnabrück public prosecutor’s office had been offered the sought-after documents long before the search. The public prosecutor, however, presented the telephone call in question in such a way that the ministry initially refused to hand over the documents and referred to “the great official channel”. So it was decided to request searches in both houses. It is unanimously said that the investigators were able to see the documents in question without any problems.
The Green Chancellor candidate Annalena Baerbock called on Scholz to be “full of transparency” on Sunday evening at the third TV triall. Union faction vice Carsten Linnemann also asked Scholz to clarify. “There were obviously major failures. They all have to come to light before the election,” said the CDU politician Rheinische Post. “Incidentally, the allegations against the work of the public prosecutor’s office are completely unacceptable. That is simply not appropriate, not even in the hottest election campaign, because it undermines trust in our constitutional state.”
Scholz refers to the personnel strengthening of the FIU
Scholz emphasized in the Triell broadcast by ProSieben, Sat.1 and Kabel Eins that under him as finance minister a lot had been improved in the fight against money laundering. For example, 100 employees were once employed at the FIU. “Now there are 500 employed, soon there will be 700,” said Scholz. The newspapers Straubinger Tagblatt/Landhuter Newspaper and Evening News he said: “The FIU should no longer just forward the suspicious transaction reports on money laundering, of which there are now almost 150,000 per year, but rather organize and evaluate them as in other countries.” To this end, the FIU had, among other things, massively increased its staff, and more access rights to the databases of other authorities had been created.
“We have implemented European rules and there is now an external consideration of all operational processes in order to optimally set up the authority. What can be done in such a short time has been done,” said Scholz. “German authorities work well with other German authorities, including the public prosecutor’s office in Osnabrück, and they give out cases that they are asked about.”
The search in the Ministry of Finance gave rise to speculation on an election campaign background – among other things, because the head of the Osnabrück public prosecutor, Bernard Südbeck, is also a CDU member, as is Lower Saxony’s Justice Minister Barbara Havliza. The spokesman for the investigative authority rejected the speculation. The investigation would not be led by Südbeck, he said.
The constitutional lawyer Joachim Wieland nevertheless considers the search to be illegal. There are “sweeping doubts about the required proportionality of the search,” he wrote in a blog entry. “There is no apparent reason for the sharp sword of a search. It was not necessary and therefore illegal.” The Osnabrück investigation should meanwhile not bring a quick result. They would “take some more time to complete,” said the prosecutor’s spokesman.