The case dates back to his time as mayor of Hamburg. The opposition criticizes the lack of “transparency”
The German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has denied this Friday before a committee of the Hamburg state Parliament of any involvement in the Cum-Ex tax fraud plot, in which several European stockbrokers are involved.
These agents took advantage of a legal loophole that allowed them to receive tax refunds for taxes they had not paid. As far as Scholz is concerned, the committee is investigating whether the chancellor or other top officials in his Social Democratic party used his influence to exempt Warburg Bank from paying €47 million in taxes.
“I did not exercise any influence in the fiscal procedure on Warburg, nor is there the slightest indication that he agreed with anything that was being done,” Scholz declared in his new appearance.
Scholz had previously denied all charges in a case dating back to his time as mayor of Hamburg, when he had three meetings with the bank’s owners, Max Warburg and Christian Olearius, in 2016 and 2017.
Scholz admitted his presence at these meetings during his first appearance, but assured that he did not remember the content of the conversations.
Olearius, in his testimony, stated that Scholz had sent a letter to the then state finance minister, Peter Tschentscher, in which he declared the collection of these taxes as “unjustified”. Shortly after, the state tax authorities withdrew the lawsuit requiring the bank to pay these 47 million, understanding that the case had prescribed.
The bank, one of the economic pillars of Germany’s second largest city, finally paid the taxes at stake after the intervention of the federal Ministry of Finance.
Tschentscher, now the mayor of Hamburg, confirmed that he had forwarded Scholz’s letter, but described these accusations as “baseless”, while the opposition has criticized the chancellor for his lack of transparency.
“Scholz has already admitted three conversations, when he had previously assured that he participated in only one,” the Christian Democrat leader Friedrich Merz lamented to the newspaper ‘Handelsblatt’. For the leader of the Left, Dietmar Barsch, this case casts “a cloud of mistrust on the chancellor.”
However, the German chief executive received the firm support of the finance minister, the liberal Christian Linder, who told the ‘Rheinische Post’ newspaper his “absolute confidence” in the chancellor.
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