Status: 08/17/2022 07:44 a.m
In the Cum-Ex investigations, prosecutors also examined emails from Chancellor Scholz’s office manager. According to documents that dem NDR and other media available, they found a “potentially evidentiary” document.
The Cologne public prosecutor’s office is also targeting a high-ranking employee in the Chancellery in their investigations into the Cum-Ex affair against the Hamburg private bank MM Warburg. On April 21 of this year, investigators from North Rhine-Westphalia confiscated the e-mail inbox of Jeanette Schwamberger, office manager in the Chancellery and one of Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s closest confidants for years. This emerges from documents that NDRthe “Stern” and the “Manager Magazin”.
“Suspicious” mail to Schmidt
When searching the mailbox, the investigators came across an email written by Schwamberger in April 2021, which the Cologne public prosecutor classifies as suspicious. In connection with a query by the Hamburg Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry on Scholz’s appointments on the subject of Cum-Ex, Warburg and with bankers and politicians, the office manager wrote an email with suggestions and sent it to Wolfgang Schmidt, the current head of the Federal Chancellery and then State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Finance.
The public prosecutor’s assessment states under the subheading “The topic of data deletion”: “The following calendar entries and e-mails are potentially relevant as evidence, since they suggest that data should be deleted.” The e-mail from Scholz’s office manager to Schmidt is in second place in the following list from the public prosecutor’s office.
In addition to the Schwamberger mail, the public prosecutor’s office rated other messages in electronic mailboxes and calendars from a number of Hamburg tax officials, senators and state councilors as conspicuous in a 78-page note from the end of June this year.
Scholz: Not included in the calendar query
Scholz – then Federal Minister of Finance – left on request to the NDR say that he was “neither involved in the calendar query nor in the sending of the calendar excerpts”. Schmidt and Schwamberger would have taken care of that. A government spokeswoman assured that NDR: “There was no ‘selection’ of calendar dates.”
Investigations against Kahrs and Pawelczyk
The confiscation of the electronic mailbox of the Scholz confidants is related to the investigations into the former SPD member of the Bundestag Johannes Kahrs as well as against the former Hamburg Deputy Mayor Alfons Pawelczyk and a Hamburg tax officer.
It is about the cum-ex transactions of the Hamburg private bank MM Warburg. The three accused are said to have helped the bank not to have to repay 47 million euros obtained from criminal file transactions.
Committee investigates influence
The affair also focuses on Scholz and Hamburg’s Mayor Peter Tschentscher. Currently incoming Committee of Inquiry the question of whether Scholz as mayor and Tschentscher as his finance senator exerted political influence at first not to reclaim the millions. Both Scholz and Tschentscher deny that. So far there is no evidence of influence.
Confronted with the research, Richard Seelmaecker, CDU chairman in the Hamburg investigative committee on the NDR, says: “This is of course extremely alarming, because the public prosecutor’s office does not simply order any seizures out of the blue, but then the public prosecutor’s office has a concrete suspicion.”
Court: search “proportionate”
The Cologne district court approved the search of the mailboxes. In his search warrant, which NDR magazine Panorama“Stern” and “Manager Magazin”, the court justified the measures by saying that it could also contain relevant emails for preparing Scholz’s testimony in the parliamentary investigative committee on the Cum-Ex affair in Hamburg in April 2021.
The measure is proportionate because of the enormous tax damage. It’s about Schwamberger’s time in the Federal Ministry of Finance. She was Scholz’s office manager there before moving to the Chancellery in the same capacity.