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Olaf Scholz before the Wirecard committee: The self

2021-04-22T22:18:54.806Z


With the image of the forward-looking crisis manager, Olaf Scholz wants to become Chancellor. He allegedly did not notice much of the Wirecard scandal until shortly before the bankruptcy - and is now rejecting personal responsibility before the investigative committee.


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Olaf Scholz before his questioning in the Wirecard investigation committee

Photo: Kay Nietfeld / dpa

On January 12, 2019, Wirecard managers Burkhard Ley and Georg von Waldenfels received an email from the German embassy in Beijing. "The current state of negotiations has just reached me," wrote the finance attaché, a delegate from the Federal Ministry of Finance. Below that he copied two sentences from a planned final declaration for the upcoming Sino-German financial dialogue. Beijing wanted to allow "able and willing" payment service providers from Germany to enter the domestic market.

The passage, which was resolved verbatim shortly thereafter, caused enthusiasm at Wirecard, because it read as if it was tailor-made for the payment service provider. The financial attaché was also in good spirits. "Our minister will also want to sell this success if, from your point of view, nothing speaks against it," wrote the diplomat. "I think this high-ranking mention will be of great benefit to Wirecard." There were no objections to the Dax group. "That is really very good news and the Minister can of course mention this great success in any case," replied von Waldenfels.

Wirecard is broke, lost in the biggest accounting scandal in post-war history.

The minister mentioned in the emails is in office and would like to move from finance to the chancellery for the SPD in September.

On Thursday, Olaf Scholz had to be questioned by the Wirecard investigation committee of the Bundestag.

In the end, the committee had worked towards the appearance for almost half a year.

Because with no other top politician so many threads of the scandal come together as with Scholz.

Among other things, he is the employer of the financial supervisory authority Bafin, which did not prevent the fraud at Wirecard despite many warning signals.

So does the Vice Chancellor have personal responsibility for the scandal?

"No," says Scholz without hesitation.

His state secretaries are also "good people" and not responsible.

In a prepared declaration that Scholz reads out at the beginning, the discharge is even more comprehensive: "The federal government is not responsible for this highly criminal fraud."

That is a remarkable statement - also because the government is interpreting the scandal more and more differently in view of the looming election campaign.

In the SPD, for example, one likes to refer to the role of auditors, who have long approved Wirecard's figures and whose supervision is based on Federal Economics Minister Peter Altmaier (CDU).

Altmaier had made a "hazy statement" the day before, blasphemed SPD chairman Jens Zimmermann.

Will the opposition become unemployed?

Conversely, Scholz's questioning quickly crunches with the Union representatives.

When CDU chairman Matthias Hauer asked him to speak louder, Scholz let him know that he would speak as loudly as ever.

Hauer will later raise allegations against Scholz because the emails to Wirecard were sent from a private address and thus withheld from the committee.

SPD man Zimmermann speaks of a "political stunt that our coalition partner has done here."

In view of such "emotional tensions" in the coalition, the "job of the opposition is already half done," scoffs left chairman Fabio De Masi.

Scholz acknowledges this with a laugh that Markus Söder might describe as "smurfy".

The mistakes that the supervisor at Wirecard made are not so funny. Instead of investigating warnings, the Bafin imposed a badly justified short sale ban on shares in the group, reported a journalist to the Financial Times on suspicion of insider trading and, until bankruptcy, fought with the Lower Bavaria government about who should check Wirecard for money laundering. Against this background, the comprehensive self-exoneration of the witness Scholz is remarkable.

Allegedly, the minister was not involved in important aspects of the Wirecard scandal, or only involved late. This is how it was described by numerous employees, including State Secretaries Jörg Kukies and Wolfgang Schmidt. Both presented themselves to the MPs as detail-obsessed connoisseurs of the scandal. But when it came to the involvement of your superior, they became noticeably cloudy.

As Finance Minister and Vice Chancellor, Scholz undoubtedly had other issues than Wirecard, especially since the beginning of the corona pandemic. However, it was precisely in this area that the candidate for chancellor maintained his image as a forward-looking crisis manager who takes care of everything - from economic aid to vaccination plans. Even before the corona crisis, Scholz was happy to explain to a smaller group how all kinds of problems could be solved, even outside of his department. It does not really fit this image that Scholz supposedly noticed so little of the historical scandal in his own area of ​​responsibility.

Was it simply blinded in the Ministry of Finance by the hope of the digital company Wirecard and therefore didn't take a closer look? Scholz describes this in the committee as an "absurd fairy tale". But references to Wirecard's successful lobbying work can be found again and again - such as the enthusiastic email from the financial attaché in China. It was originally not part of the committee files either, but can be found in data from Wirecard's ex-board member Ley.

"I don't know this email that you are now describing," says Scholz when left chairman De Masi spoke to him on Thursday about the news that he would like to "sell" a success for Wirecard. Wirecard played no role in its talks in China. Scholz also has little to contribute to another message from the embassy employee to the Ministry of Finance. It states that an agreement between Scholz and his Chinese counterpart is apparently "understood as an instruction [...] not to put any obstacles in the way of Wirecard AG." How did you come to this assessment? "You would have to ask the embassy that," says the minister.

The Scholz survey ends in the early evening - and thus much earlier than many other sessions. Despite all the criticism, the minister finally got through the questioning without a hitch. De Masi, who has been working on Scholz and the Wirecard issue for a long time, also admits that. Apparently this scandal is "like a war injury" for Scholz, says the left-wing politician. "He limps, but he doesn't fall."

Source: spiegel

All business articles on 2021-04-22

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