Emails from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz have been scrutinized as part of an investigation into the "
CumEx Files
" scandal, a dividend tax fraud, the
Hamburger Abendblatt
daily reported on Monday (August 8th) .
Investigators examined emails in March beginning on January 1, 2015, when Olaf Scholz was mayor of Hamburg (north), a position he retained until his appointment in 2018 as finance minister in the former government. Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The CumEx scandal, a fraud first revealed in 2017, concerns an ingenious tax optimization scheme put in place by banks and allowing foreign investors to reduce their taxes on dividends.
Dozens of people have been charged in the case in Germany, including bankers, traders, lawyers and financial advisers.
A total of ten countries are concerned.
"Nothing to hide"
Among the banks incriminated was the Warburg in Hamburg, which should have reimbursed 47 million euros to the German port city, but the municipality had waived it in 2016. The investigators are trying to find out whether political leaders - and among them Olaf Scholz, mayor of the city - put pressure on the municipal tax authorities to stop collecting these taxes.
Olaf Scholz is to be questioned again on Friday in Hamburg by a parliamentary committee on his role in this affair.
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His spokesman, Steffen Hebestreit, told the
Hamburger Abendblatt
that the chancellor was not aware of the investigation into his emails and that “
there is nothing else to hide
”.
The decision to waive the reimbursement of the sums owed by the Warburg bank would have been taken shortly after a conversation of the mayor at the time, Olaf Scholz, with Christian Olearius, then head of the bank, according to the German press.
Olaf Scholz, however, denies having pressured the tax authorities of the city of Hamburg to give up collecting these taxes.
