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Hamburg's top politicians, known nationwide:
Olaf Scholz and Peter Tschentscher
Photo: Sean Gallup / Getty Images
Christian Olearius
(79) wrote in his diary on November 8, 2016
, that he was full of excitement
. Mayor Olaf Scholz wanted to reach him. Olearius, co-owner of the Hamburg private bank MM Warburg, had a problem at the time. His bank is said to pay back 47 million euros to the state treasury, which it is said to have stolen with tax tricks called Cum-ex. He has already met Scholz twice about this, and two weeks earlier he handed the mayor a paper with counter-arguments.
The next morning at 9 a.m.,
Olaf Scholz
(63; SPD) finally called.
Olearius noted that Scholz had said he should send the paper to the Finance Senator without further comments, at that time
Peter Tschentscher
(55, SPD), today's mayor.
In any case, eight days later his problem was solved: The city of Hamburg waived the million dollar claim.
Has that to do with the meeting between Scholz and Olearius?
A parliamentary committee of inquiry is currently trying to clarify this in Hamburg.
All those involved deny any influence from politics.
Scholz himself cannot remember the meeting, but is also sure that he did not exert any influence.
Tell-tale calendar entries
Now, however, entries in the service calendar of the current mayor and then Finance Senator Peter Tschentscher (SPD) raise new questions: Scholz and Tschentscher therefore telephoned on November 8, 2016, i.e. shortly before Scholz advised the banker to send his defense paper to Tschentscher - " without further comment ".
Did you talk about the Warburg case?
A Tschentscher spokesman confirmed the appointment.
There is no information on the specific reason for the conversation, the content or the duration of the conversation in the documents.
Tschentscher did not influence the decision, the tax administration only made legal decisions.
The calendar is likely to cause a stir in Hamburg's politics.
The processes fit into a picture that does not make many in the opposition believe in coincidences.
And once again the future Chancellor has to ask himself why he kept something secret in the clarification of the events surrounding the Warburg millions.
The focus of the affair are processes in the Hamburg tax administration in autumn 2016. After months of examination, the tax office is certain at the beginning of October: The city is to bring back millions from Warburg, which the bank had possibly wrongly sneaked through cum-ex deals.
At that time, the public prosecutor's office had been investigating the bank for months.
Now the tax office has come to the conclusion to reclaim part of the looted money because 47 million euros threaten to expire at the end of the year.
In a long report, the tax office explains the situation to the superior tax authority, the Hamburg equivalent of a finance ministry, and asks for approval.
A few days after receiving the report, on October 13th, the head of the tax administration at the time informed her boss Peter Tschentscher: The case is difficult, no matter how you decide, you make yourself vulnerable.
She recently reported to the Hamburg investigative committee.
The bank owners speak at the highest level
The bank, an institution in Hamburg, has also learned of the tax office's plans. The two well-networked main owners, Christian Olearius and
Max Warburg
(73), speak at the highest level. Although it is also known there that the bank is being investigated for serious tax evasion, the bankers get an appointment with Scholz. On October 26th they meet the mayor in the town hall, the second time within a few weeks. They had a letter of defense drawn up for this meeting, which they handed over to the mayor. The letter is addressed to the responsible officer in the tax office, to whom you will also send it the next day.
To this day, bankers say they did not know that illegal activities were going on in these deals. In the meantime, a former general agent of the bank has been sentenced to more than five years in prison, the verdict is not yet final. The Federal Court of Justice ruled that Warburg had to repay the money stolen by Cum-ex. At that time, they wanted to prevent this repayment - and even then they argued in their paper that they were innocent.
Olaf Scholz does not remember the meeting. Nor about what happened to the paper. When he testified in the Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry, he declared almost forty times that he did not remember. As mayor, he had spoken to many people on a regular basis and he could not remember all of these conversations. His basic maxim is to be cautious in such conversations. That is why he is sure of one thing: He has not interfered in the tax procedure.
In this case, however, Scholz takes action by calling Olearius on November 9th and recommending forwarding it to Tschentscher without further comments.
Scholz said last spring in the committee of inquiry that he wanted to "ensure the official channels" with the council.
The official channel with the letter to the tax office had long been taken, as Scholz could have known from the address line of the letter alone - moreover, the official channel would have been the tax office and not the tax authority.
Why did Scholz keep silent about the meeting?
Now it comes out that Scholz exchanged ideas with Tschentscher shortly before this phone call - and Scholz kept this meeting secret in his questioning last spring.
In the committee, Scholz had stated that his office had searched his calendar for appointments with Mr. Tschentscher.
No date is noted in which the topic Warburg or Cum-ex is noted.
He couldn't remember it either.
But why did Scholz, who likes to praise himself for his transparency, not name the meeting at the explosive time?
In large parts of Hamburg and Berlin politics, this is likely to cause displeasure, because it is not the first lack of transparency in the Warburg case.
Several times, parliamentarians in Berlin, like in Hamburg, have already felt swindled by Scholz and the Hamburg Senate:
In November 2019, the Die Linke parliamentary group in the Hamburg Parliament asked the Senate whether there had been any meetings between those responsible for Warburg and Olaf Scholz as part of the tax proceedings. The Senate answers very briefly: No. A little later, in February 2020, the weekly newspaper "Die Zeit" and the ARD magazine "Panorama" report that Olaf Scholz met with Olearius in November 2017.
Following the reporting, Scholz said that it was all "hot air", but that he could not comment on it because of the tax secrecy. Scholz is then questioned twice in the Bundestag Finance Committee. Scholz mentions in the interviews that he spoke on Olearius' birthday in 2012, that he met him in the Elbphilharmonie. But no further meetings in his office. A little later, in September 2020, "Die Zeit", "Panorama" and the "Süddeutsche Zeitung" report that Scholz received Olearius twice in his office in 2016 when the tax authorities were brooding over the recovery. Obviously, it was also about Cum-ex, at least that's what Olearius noted in his diary. Since then, Scholz has been referring to gaps in memory in all three conversations.
The experienced Hamburg criminal defense lawyer Gerhard Strate says: "The fact that three conversations and one phone call are no longer remembered in terms of content would not be accepted by any witness in a normal criminal trial. That would raise the suspicion that they were lying."
And he also considers the role of Peter Tschentscher, who succeeded Scholz when he went to Berlin as Finance Minister and Vice Chancellor in 2018, to be underexposed.
His actions can be judged as beneficiaries under criminal law.
"The files show that Tschentscher was well informed about the case. As an employer, he would have been legally obliged to intervene to prevent a possible loss of tax money."
The bank would like to see a decision soon
Tschentscher had always emphasized that he had never influenced decisions by the financial administration. As the Senator for Finance, he never took part in the processing of tax cases, but was informed about the administrative procedures in important cases. In the meantime, however, the committee has shown that Tschentscher was not only informed, but was very actively involved in the case. Not least because Scholz sent him the letter from the Warburg Bank.
Tschentscher received the letter from Olearius on November 9th. "Dear Senator," begins the letter. Because of the importance of the process, writes Olearius, he took the liberty of sending a copy of a letter that he had recently sent to the tax officer, Ms. P., who was responsible for his bank. In this letter, Olearius argues on seven pages that his bank always obeyed the law. And that the tax office should consider that a multi-million dollar repayment could endanger the existence of the bank. Olearius ended his letter to the senator and thus to the tax clerk's employer with the sentence that an early decision would be in the interests of the bank.
Tschentscher processed the paper on the same day, a Wednesday, as indicated by notes on it.
He asks a member of his staff to consult.
Two days later, on Friday, November 11th, according to the calendar, he will meet with his head of tax administration.
The Senate Chancellery confirms the date.
The conversation in the Senate's office was scheduled for 30 minutes; further information on the reason for the conversation or the content was not documented.
In the investigation committee, the head of the tax administration stated that sometime after the meeting on October 13, she informed Tschentscher at a further meeting that there would be a discussion between the authorities' superiors and the tax office - but she could not agree on the exact date recall.
The paper will be delivered personally
One thing is clear, however: After the weekend, on Monday, November 14, 2016, Tschentscher will forward the paper to the officials who are conducting the conversation. On the first page he wrote in green senatorial ink: "Request for information on the state of affairs." Tschentscher's adviser on the committee explained that he had brought the paper directly to the head of department responsible.
This is an unusual practice for the officers who receive the paper. It was "not so very often" that documents on specific tax cases were passed down, the head of the tax administration explained after various inquiries in the investigation committee. The clerk in charge put it a little more clearly: It had "very, very seldom", "really extremely seldom". However, neither of them consider this to be an influence. There was no political influence, both said.
Nevertheless, the decision was made a few days later, just as the Warburg owners had imagined. Three days after receipt, on Thursday, November 17th, the employees and other colleagues from the tax authorities met with two employees from the tax office. The result is recorded in a two-page protocol: They did not want to claim the money back from Warburg. The matter is legally delicate and a recovery would "presumably lead to the immediate collapse of the bank".
The main arguments from the conversation can also be found in the paper that the Warburg Bank had fed into the apparatus above and below.
All of the officers present stated in the committee of inquiry that the decision had been made without dissenting votes and without political influence being taken for legal reasons.
The letter did not play a decisive role either.
A dubious decision
Nevertheless, one can have serious doubts about the decision - because the central arguments, borrowed from the Warburg defense paper, to forego the recovery claim, were very shaky. At that time, courts had already paved the way for reclaiming money from cum-ex deals with relative ease. The officials from the tax office had pointed this out again and again, in other federal states exactly that was done. And bankruptcy was not threatened either: auditors had checked on behalf of the banking supervisory authority whether Warburg could afford the repayment - and the bank had already been forced to take precautionary measures.
But apparently no one wanted to know exactly, so the officials reported to the committee. The tax office did not investigate whether the bank was really threatened with bankruptcy. The bank had stated it that way, that was believed, said the officer in charge. The employees of the tax authority, including the head of the tax administration, stated that they had not checked that either, they had relied on the expertise of the tax office.
In any case, people at the bank were happy back then.
Only two days after the decisive meeting, on November 19th, according to the diary, Olearius met Olaf Scholz at the funeral service of the deceased Hamburg Senator for Culture, Barbara Kisseler.
Scholz gives a funeral speech there.
Olearius wrote in his diary that he shook hands with the mayor in front of the door of the hall and briefly said "Thank you".
What is not to be understood from the context.
Peter Tschentscher will be officially informed on November 23rd.
Subject: "Warburg Bank - here: Your request for information on the state of affairs".
Tschentscher still has two questions about details that will be answered quickly.
Then he accepts that his city will let suspected tax evaders escape with their millions of loot.