The Chancellor can’t get rid of the Cum-Ex affair. New documents and e-mails from Olaf Scholz’s inner circle are a wake-up call star-Information doubts about the portrayal of his role.
Olaf Scholz is back from the summer break. He wants to support the economy and get his chancellorship going. The problem is: He can’t get rid of the Cum-Ex affair, the tax scandal at Hamburg’s private bank Warburg, which has been haunting him for years.
Is Scholz telling the truth in the affair?
Dem star there are new e-mails from his closest environment. They show discrepancies in the Social Democrat team. And they raise doubts about the core of his account of not being able to remember the meetings with the private bank. It’s about a calendar entry that Scholz referred to – which his own team could not find.
What you need to know: During his time as Hamburg mayor, Scholz met Christian Olearius, Chairman of the Warburg Supervisory Board, three times when the bank was being investigated for tax evasion. The banker sought Scholz’ help to prevent the tax office from claiming millions back for so-called cum-ex transactions. Scholz denies having any influence on the matter. He only confirmed his meetings with Olearius after they had been made public in the media.
The new documents are about the meeting between the two on November 10, 2017. In February 2020, Scholz was now Federal Minister of Finance, and it became known through media reports that Olearius had noted the date in his diary. After the revelation, Scholz’ spokesman Steffen Hebestreit confirmed that the two met in November 2017 in the mayor’s office – “as can be seen from the mayor’s calendar”.
The story makes waves. Scholz will be interviewed twice in the Bundestag Finance Committee in spring and summer 2020. He confirms the November meeting there. Scholz did not tell the MPs that he had previously met Olearius twice in Hamburg City Hall.
The search for the calendar entry
At the instigation of the CDU and the Left, the Hamburg Parliament will set up the “Cum-Ex Tax Money Affair” committee of inquiry in 2021. First of all, the MPs want to hear Scholz. They also request insight into his calendar, which Hebestreit explicitly referred to.
Jeanette Schwamberger, Scholz’s office manager for many years and to this day one of his closest employees, takes care of the calendar request from Hamburg. She knows about the potential explosive nature of the dates. Schwamberger wrote to Wolfgang Schmidt, State Secretary at the time and Scholz’s closest confidante, that it was “to be discussed with Olaf” about how to “sort” the appointments. The verb to sort puts them in quotation marks.
For the next three weeks, Schwamberger will be busy with Scholz’s calendar in order to be able to present appointment entries to the committee.
On April 30, 2021, Scholz must testify before the investigative committee. Five days beforehand, Schmidt was working on a speaking slip for Scholz. At 7:10 p.m., he e-mailed suggested formulations to Jeanette Schwamberger, Scholz’s office manager: Warburg-Bank had made provisions and would pay in the event of a conviction. The taxpayer “does not have to fear any damage,” writes Schmidt, and further suggests: “In November 2017, the then Mayor Olaf Scholz met with Mr. Olearius in his mayor’s office for a conversation. This can be found in the mayor’s work calendar. “
“I have never seen an appointment with Olearius from November 2017 on the calendar.”
Schwamberger replies at 10:30 p.m.: “That irritates me,” she writes to Schmidt and Hebestreit, she can’t find anything in the calendar file. “I’ve never seen an appointment with Olearius from November 2017 on the calendar. Not even an appointment in October 2017. It’s all strange, but we’re all through the calendar.”
Alleged IT problems
Scholz now has a problem. For months he has been assuring the public and the Bundestag that he has no recollection of the meetings with the controversial private bankers, but that he can confirm them after looking at his calendar. His spokesman had also referred to the calendar. Only there is apparently no calendar entry for the meeting in November 2017.
Schmidt is not irritated by Schwamberger in his version and writes at 10:56 p.m.: “The appointment was in November 2017. And I also remember that we had seen that.” Unfortunately, Scholz can no longer refer to a calendar entry. At this point, Schwamberger’s research came to nothing.
Scholz’s statement to the committee of inquiry is special. Due to an IT problem in his finance ministry, the calendar from mid-October 2017 “only contains appointments from my predecessor, Federal Minister Altmaier”. “In this respect, I assume that the meeting will have taken place, even if I have no personal memory of it.” That sounds like: the calendar is unfortunately incomplete, but the appointment with Olearius must have been in it.
Findings from the State Criminal Police Office of North Rhine-Westphalia speak against this version. The authority, which confiscated an e-mail inbox from Scholz as part of its investigation, has now evaluated this in a note. Lo and behold: eight dates have been set for November 10, 2017, from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. According to this, Scholz visited a research center in Hamburg and opened the conference of a well-known foundation in the city. An appointment with Olearius is not recorded.
This raises many new questions. How is it that Scholz’ spokesman Hebestreit referred to a calendar entry that apparently never existed? On what basis was Scholz able to confirm the date himself? If there was no calendar entry, the confirmation for the meeting in November 2017 must actually be based on memories – but Scholz allegedly does not want to have had them.
Is there a new committee of inquiry?
To this day, the Social Democrat maintains that he had no political influence on the question of tax refunds. But why not mark a meeting in your own study on the official calendar when it was harmless? Once again, the chancellor’s credibility is suffering.
Hebestreit and Scholz do not answer questions. The federal government, whose spokesman Hebestreit is today, has a spokeswoman say: “Please understand that the Federal Chancellery and the Federal Press Office can only comment on matters within their own area of responsibility.”
Possibly both will have to testify publicly about it. The Union wants a new committee of inquiry. It should soon be clarified legally whether and in what form it will come.