It is news with a history behind it, and this history raises questions for everyone involved – including Germany’s largest weekly newspaper. The journalist Josef Joffe is therefore no longer an active co-editor of the time. “The publishers and Josef Joffe have mutually decided that his mandate as publisher will be suspended until the end of the contract,” confirmed a spokeswoman for the publisher Süddeutsche Zeitung. 78-year-old Joffe’s contract runs until March 2023. Joffe himself explained on Tuesday when asked by SZ: “The publisher and I both thought that was appropriate in an unclear situation. Pressure was not involved.”
His departure comes just days after a controversial letter became public. By then, the award-winning Joffe had achieved almost everything that is possible in a journalist’s life: he began his career in the 1970s at the Time. From 1985 he was for the Southgerman newspaper worked in Munich, headed the foreign policy department as a brilliant cross-departmental stylist and influential opinion leader before returning to 2000 time moved to Hamburg, where he was one of the editors and in the meantime – together with Michael Naumann – had also taken over the editorship. But now Joffe is confronted with serious allegations.
Specifically, the question is: Was an investigative report on the cum-ex scandal deliberately delayed in order to do a private banker friend of Josef Joffe a favor? Said letter, which Joffe wrote in January 2017 to Max Warburg, the co-owner of the Hamburg Warburg Bank, contains passages that can be read in this way. At the beginning of May he had mirror Excerpts from this letter published. When asked by SZ, Joffe himself confirmed that the document is genuine and that it came from him.
“At our age, this is no time to fuck around with old friendships.”
According to the letter, the two friends Joffe and Warburg had a dispute over reporting on Warburg-Bank’s cum-ex deals in the time broken out Warburg is said to have vented his anger in a letter to Joffe. The banker “always blamed him for the bank’s debacle,” Joffe explained today when asked by the SZ. So he decided to write his own letter “to remind him that business and friendship are two different things”.
Actually used time and private bank good connections. Also with the former SPD Interior Senator, later Federal Chancellor and later timepublisher Helmut Schmidt was well known to Max Warburg. The banker belonged to the legendary Friday party at Schmidt’s at home in Hamburg-Langenhorn and heads the Helmut and Loki Schmidt Foundation there as Chairman of the Board. The headquarters of time in the center of Hamburg has been called Helmut-Schmidt-Haus since the beginning of 2016. A sister of Max Warburg is married to Michael Naumann, formerly SPD Minister of State for Culture and then first editor-in-chief and then publisher of time – together with Joffe.
“At our age, this is no time to fuck around with old friendships,” says Joffe in his page-long reply to Max Warburg. Literally it also says: “I warned you about what was in the pipeline, and it was thanks to my intervention that the piece was pushed and the bank was given the opportunity to contradict”. Joffe also points out that he “begged” the banker to hire “an excellent PR agency.” In the letter, Joffe describes the whistleblowers in the money house, who apparently alerted investigators to the cum-ex behavior there, as “traitors in Warburg’s own house”.
When asked by the SZ on Tuesday, Joffe explained that he had by no means warned Warburg about the relevant research time warned in cooperation with the NDR. That finally “would have violated the journalistic ethos”. Rather, he read the article that has not yet been published and merely advised the editors to talk to the bank “to secure the piece”. Secondly, he said – “because the bank had bricked” – advised his friend Max Warburg to talk to the journalists.
Is this impression correct? Didn’t the journalists sufficiently confront the bank with the allegations before the article was published – and thus violated quasi-professional standards?
NDR journalist Oliver Schröm, who was part of the Cum-Ex research team whose article is about, rejects this on Twitter. The bank was asked for an opinion early on before publication. The NDR magazine panorama immediately published the television report based on the research. In the time but the post was initially pushed.
Why? Of the time When asked, it said: “There was still a need for research, and we had discussions in all directions. That made the story even stronger. Incidentally, that was the decision of the business editors,” said a spokeswoman. Josef Joffe tells the SZ: He heard that the researchers had sent a catalog of questions to the bank, which had either not been answered or only answered evasively. In any case, according to Joffe, there were no quotations from the Warburg Bank in the draft of the article. That’s why he remarked: “You have to talk to them.” And then? Joffe: “The troops did that too and came back upset because the Warburgers hadn’t answered cooperatively.”
According to journalist Schröm, while the story was being pushed, there should be a meeting with representatives of the bank in the editorial offices of the time have given – that in Schröm’s view of intimidation should serve journalists. the time explains that the conversation was held to confront Warburg with the allegations. A spokeswoman says: “At this meeting there was a remark that could be understood as an attempt to blackmail with advertising money.”
The weekly newspaper denies Joffe exerting any influence: “As the publisher, he wouldn’t be entitled to that. We reported on it in a total of 15 issues.” Joffe himself also emphasizes that as editor of the time have no authority to issue instructions. Editors are also not familiar with the internals of a department. In addition: “The report that was then printed was devastating – which does not suggest an intervention.” No, he doesn’t think he did anything wrong, explains Joffe. “My leaked letter was a last-ditch effort to salvage a 40-year-old friendship with Max W.”
However, the 78-year-old is upset that this private letter to Max Warburg ended up in the hands of mirror-Journalists has arrived. He suspects that it “was probably ‘punctured’ by the public prosecutor’s office”. Joffe: “That has to be clarified.”