Cum-Ex scandal: “Chancellor Scholz lies and invents agenda entry” Swiss couple killed in accident in Sardinia

The chancellor is smart when it comes to dealing with allegations over the controversial meeting with Warburg banker Christian Olearius. He only admits what is made public. Until then, he refers to gaps in memory and missing calendar items for appointments. Many critics say he is mocking Parliament, which wanted to provide clarity in committee meetings and parliamentary investigation committees: Has the former first mayor of Hamburg and the current Chancellor had any influence on tax procedures in Hamburg?

But now the chancellor has apparently become entangled in his own argument. And to questions from the “Left” faction in the Bundestag, which is exclusively available to t-online, the federal government responded narrowly and angrily. Did the chancellor create an agenda item for a meeting with Christian Olearius – and lie about his lack of memory?

170 million euros

Olaf Scholz met Warburg boss Christian Olearius several times about the tax process. He is currently in the dock in Bonn for his bank’s illegal cum-ex transactions. It is said that he got back taxes that the bank never paid. This is called Cum-Ex. When the procedure was discovered, he asked to meet Scholz. Politics must help and has helped. Scholz advised Olearius in one of the meetings that he should write a letter of protest to the then Senator of Finance Peter Tschentscher. Olearius did this, after which the tax authorities withdrew the tax claims. In total, the Warburg-Scholz-Cum-Ex scandal is worth more than 170 million euros.

Scholz denied as long as he could

Scholz had always denied having met Olearius. Only because the media got hold of Christian Olearius’ diary, in which he wrote about the meetings, Scholz had to gradually admit to three of these meetings, but he always retreated into gaps in his memory. One of these meetings took place on November 10, 2017 and could now get Scholz in trouble because he made contradictory statements about his memories of this meeting.

In February 2020, Scholz, as Minister of Finance, publicly stated in the Hamburger Abendblatt in response to a minor question from the left-wing faction:

This statement contains at least two untruths that got Scholz into trouble.

1.) Scholz knew why the Senate could not say anything about a possible agenda item

The last sentence of the press statement from Scholz’s spokesperson Steffen Hebestreit is not true. In November 2019, the Senate responded clearly to a request from the “Die Linke” faction in the Hamburg parliament about meetings between former first mayor Olaf Scholz and representatives of the Warburg Bank about the cum-ex tax proceedings against the bank: such meetings are not given. This later turned out to be false. The Senate’s very specific reason for not making the meetings public was later: since first mayors generally do not interfere with ongoing tax procedures, meetings on the tax procedures were also refused.

The left is digging

In August 2023, four years later, the parliamentary group asked again on what grounds the Hamburg Senate had refused such meetings at the time. Former Bundestag member Fabio De Masi noted that the Hamburg Senate, according to his own statements, no longer had access to Scholz’s agenda since Scholz changed office, becoming Finance Minister in March 2018.

The Senate’s response in official German:

In summary: Everything necessary and possible to answer the question.

The Senate did not sit idle and at the end of 2019 asked the Federal Ministry of Finance about such meetings between Scholz and the Warburg Bank, because Scholz was now a minister there.

Scholz’s ministry seems dead

Scholz’s ministry simply did not answer, knew that the Hamburg Senate could not look at the calendar and then created the misleading impression with the last sentence in the press statement that Scholz had nothing to do with not making the meetings public:

Scholz and his spokesman knew exactly why the Senate could not accurately answer the left’s small question. Because Scholz did not make the meetings public despite an official request from the Senate.

2.) The agenda item has not been in his agenda since at least March 2018

The second sentence of the above press statement is also untrue, especially the part that states that the meeting between Olearius and Scholz on November 10, 2017 came “from the agenda of the first mayor”.

Because this date was not on the calendar at least in February 2020, at the time of Scholz’s statement by his spokesperson Hebestreit. In fact, it is more than doubtful that it ever existed.

Lying to the PUA?

In April 2021, Olaf Scholz’s office manager sent agreements from Scholz and the banker Olearius to the parliamentary investigation committee in Hamburg. But the relevant date of November 10, 2017 was of course not there. The office manager, as Stern reported, wrote the sentence in the email: “There are no entries in the ministerial calendar of the Federal Ministry of Finance for this date.” And according to Stern she would have become even clearer in an email:

A possible reason for the missing entry: When Scholz moved from the office of first mayor to the Ministry of Finance, there would have been a technical problem transferring the service calendar from the end of 2018. After the synchronization, from mid-October 2017 “only appointments of my predecessor in office”, ex-federal minister Altmaier, are found, as Scholz himself said in the Hamburg investigative committee.

At the time of the press release, there was no agenda item for the event. Scholz is telling an untruth here. And: if such an agenda item never existed, he cannot be relied on to answer the Left Party’s questions. So he must have his own memory of the appointment, which he always denied to the end. “Chancellor Scholz lies about holes in his memory and makes up an agenda item,” says Cum-Ex expert Fabio De Masi, who was on the left in the Bundestag for a long time and recently filed a complaint against Scholz for making a false statement. . “This also negates the memory gap, because I can only confirm an appointment without recording if I remember.”

Even though De Masi has now left the party, he continues to work closely with politicians in the group. Together with Christian Leye, he initiated a small investigation with the federal government and confronted them with the above-mentioned contradictions. The answer is sobering:

“Making a false statement”

“Now it is black and white,” said Christian Leye, spokesman for economic policy for the Die Linke faction. “The federal government cannot refute Olaf Scholz’s contradictions. We have a chancellor who has demonstrably lied to the public.” De Masi adds:

De Masi does not believe that the Hamburg Public Prosecution Service is actually investigating the Chancellor. “The Hamburg Public Prosecutor’s Office, which reports to the Green Senator for Justice, has so far always opposed investigations into the Warburg affair, unlike the Cologne cum-ex public prosecutors.” According to De Masi, in a previous criminal complaint filed by renowned Hamburg criminal lawyer Gerhard Strate, investigators claimed that Scholz may have incorrectly reported the facts in the Bundestag, but not in the Hamburg investigative committee. “So in the past he could only save himself from prosecution with a theoretical lie in the Bundestag. “The contradictions with the calendar item no longer allow this excuse!” says De Masi.

Response from the federal government: none

t-online wanted to know from the federal government how they could explain this contradiction in the presentation. There was no answer. Apparently the arguments here are actually running out.