The internal mail of a close collaborator of Olaf Scholz has drawn the attention of the prosecutor’s investigators to the Cum-Ex scandal. The German Chancellor appears today before the commission investigating the massive tax fraud that took place while Scholz was Economy Minister, in one of Angela Merkel’s grand coalition governments, and later while he was regional president of Hamburg. “An incredible number of people have been listened to, an incredible number of files have been studied and, if you follow the press coverage of the respective hearings, the result is always that I do not smoke political influence,” the German chancellor reiterated last week. in his latest statements on the matter. Scholz has been visibly angry at several journalistic questions related to this case and has replied that “false data is mixed in his question.” Recently, a spokesman for the Hamburg Public Prosecutor’s Office has confirmed that a complaint that tried to force the opening of proceedings against him for “lack of basis” will not be processed. But the Cologne Prosecutor’s Office has continued the investigation on its own and has investigated the emails of Scholz’s secretary until, apparently, having found evidence of a suspicious destruction of documents. The tax fraud took place between 2006 and 2013. Former German merchant bank manager MM Warburg Christian S. was convicted last year of five counts of aggravated fraud and sentenced to five and a half years in prison. The mechanism by which several large taxpayers managed to evade some 5,500 million euros in taxes, not only in Germany but also in France, Spain, Italy, Holland, Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Finland, Norway and Switzerland, consisted of buying and selling the same actions several times around the day on which the fiscal period ended, so that it was not easy for the Treasury to identify the person responsible for paying the taxes and he or she would obtain the refund. This case in point investigates how MM Warburg won the favor of the regional Ministry of Finance to avoid having to pay €47 million, after it was discovered that it had been wrongly returned to the bank. In the fall of 2016, immediately before the non-refoulement, Scholz held meetings with representatives of MM Warburg, the content of which he cannot recall precisely, as he has stated before the commission of inquiry. After those meetings, Hamburg tax officials effectively revoked his demand for the bank to return the money on the grounds that the statute of limitations had expired. New evidence What the Cologne prosecutors have now found is an email from the Chancellor’s secretary, Jeanette Schwammberger, currently chief of staff at the Chancellery and a close collaborator of Scholz for almost his entire political career, which they consider “suspicious”. The email is related to a question asked by the Hamburg parliamentary investigation committee, of which Scholz was regional chairman and mayor from 2011 to 2018. It is a message addressed to Wolfgang Schmidt, currently Minister of the Chancellery and then Secretary of State of the Ministry of Finance. The subject of the email was Scholz’s meetings with representatives of the MM Warburg bank and what has raised suspicions has specifically been a reference to the elimination of data in Scholz’s agenda that can be interpreted as a suggestion of the need to eliminate evidence that could compromise it. The investigation also affects former deputy Johannes Kahr, number two in the Scholz government in Hamburg, and former deputy mayor of Hamburg Alfons Pawelczyk, both also Social Democrats, as well as an official from the Hamburg treasury. All three are suspected of having helped the bank avoid tax payments. The case has returned to the front pages after the discovery of 215,000 euros in cash in a Kahr safe, suspected of having organized the meetings between Scholz and Warburg executives. The registration of Schwamberger’s email, during last spring, allowed us to find the email dated April 2021 and considered “potentially relevant to the evidence” because “it suggests that data was being eliminated”. Stern also cites a previously confidential statement by Scholz to the Bundestag Finance Committee containing contradictions to his statements to the Hamburg commission of inquiry.
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism