The cum-ex tricks were criminal, says the Federal Court of Justice.
Unfortunately, the SPD and the CDU cannot take advantage of the judges' lead.
Leading politicians from both parties have shown no appreciable zeal in clearing up the tax scandal for a long time.
A comment by Merkur editor-in-chief Georg Anastasiadis.
The multi-billion dollar cum-ex tax scandal is still a long way from its legal processing. The prosecutors are still investigating more than a thousand accused bankers and stock market traders. Many of the Raffkes still consider themselves innocent lambs and claim to have only exploited loopholes in tax law for themselves and their customers. The Federal Supreme Court has now cleared up this fairy tale, and in fact thoroughly: “In a“ division of labor ”and“ deliberate ”manner, those affected would have cheated the state out of a total of around ten billion euros in capital gains taxes by shifting shares back and forth around the dividend cut-off date just for themselves multiple refunds of taxes that have been paid once.
An actor who did not want to see any fraudulent intent behind such raids against the state must have been very naive - or rather enormously callous. The entire industry had lost its moral compass in the casino capitalism of the noughties. Politics put up with that for a long time. That only changed after the world financial crisis. But even then, the Federal Ministry of Finance, headed by Wolfgang Schäuble, watched the goings-on of the financial sharks for far too long. The tax authorities showed greater zeal when examining the commuter allowance in Lieschen Müller's income tax return. Even the city of Hamburg under its then mayor Olaf Scholz was, despite concrete evidence, for a long time remarkably disinterested in the well-heeled cum-ex fraudsters there. No wonder,that the SPD candidate for chancellor is so quiet on this issue that, under other circumstances, it could have been an election gift for the malevolent comrades. Unlike the perpetrators, who, according to the BGH ruling, are threatened with imprisonment and repayment of the loot, the hesitant overseers no longer have to fear legal processing.
