Cum-Ex scandal part II: What did Olaf Scholz have to do with it?

It was not only players from the finan­cial world who were involved in the cum-ex scandal. Over time, more and more possible invol­vement of lawyers and poli­ti­cians came to light.
The alleged invol­vement of promi­nent poli­ti­cians, above all the current Federal Chan­cellor Olaf Scholz, in the so-called “Hamburg Warburg affair” is parti­cu­larly poli­ti­cally explo­sive:

In the past, the Hamburg-based private bank M. M. Warburg & CO was signi­fi­cantly involved in cum-ex tran­sac­tions.
In 2021, the Federal Court of Justice ordered the bank to repay more than 176 million euros to the state treasury.
For this reason, co-owner of the bank Chris­tian Olea­rius is curr­ently on trial before the Bonn Regional Court for serious tax evasion; the bank’s former chief repre­sen­ta­tive has already been sentenced to five and a half years in prison.

The alle­ga­tions of possible poli­tical influence in this complex are basi­cally as follows:
In February 2020, the weekly news­paper Die Zeit and the poli­tical maga­zine Panorama published their rese­arch on the statute of limi­ta­tions for cum-ex reclaims.
Accor­ding to this, the Hamburg tax office had reclaimed 47 million euros from M. M. Warburg & CO Bank in 2016, which stemmed from illegal cum-ex tran­sac­tions.
In 2016 and 2017, Scholz, who was still Hamburg’s First Mayor at the time, and Olea­rius are said to have held several talks and personal meetings.
These were alle­gedly orga­nised by Johannes Kahrs, who was an SPD member of parlia­ment at the time.
Olea­rius is said to have argued in writing in favour of waiving the enforce­ment of the repay­ment claims against Warburg Bank.
During the talks, Scholz is said to have advised Olea­rius not to send this argu­men­ta­tion paper to the Hamburg tax office, but instead to send it directly to Peter Tsch­ent­scher, then Hamburg’s Senator for Finance and now Scholz’s successor as Hamburg’s First Mayor.
Evidence of these meetings and their content was found in Olea­rius’ diary entries and in chats and emails from a Hamburg tax offi­cial.
Shortly after­wards, the Hamburg tax office waived the claims for repay­ment and allowed the claims for repay­ment against Warburg Bank to lapse. The City of Hamburg thus lost 47 million euros.
Before the parlia­men­tary committee of enquiry, Scholz initi­ally denied having met with Olea­rius — he later changed his state­ment, but stated that he could not remember the details of the meetings.
In October 2020, the Hamburg Parlia­ment then set up a sepa­rate Hamburg inves­ti­ga­tive committee to look speci­fi­cally into the cancel­la­tion of the back tax claims for the benefit of Warburg Bank.
In 2022, Tsch­ent­scher had to give evidence to this committee of enquiry; the issue was what influence he might have had as the then Senator for Finance on the limi­ta­tion period for the repay­ment claims.

As things stand, Olaf Scholz cannot be legally proven to have been involved in the cum-ex complex.
However, this could change if further details about the possible invol­vement of the Federal Chan­cellor come to light in the current criminal procee­dings against Olea­rius.
In addi­tion, the CDU/CSU parlia­men­tary group in the Bundestag is curr­ently in the process of brin­ging an action before the Federal Consti­tu­tional Court for the estab­lish­ment of a further parlia­men­tary committee of enquiry.
The inves­ti­ga­tion into the Warburg affair is ther­e­fore far from complete — it remains to be seen what further inves­ti­ga­tions will bring to light.