The red-red state government of MV is again under pressure because of the country’s controversial climate foundation. The foundation’s tax files, which had disappeared in the meantime, were burned by a tax officer. The call for consequences is getting louder.
Schwerin (dpa/mv) – The burning of tax files from the controversial climate foundation MV by an official from the Ribnitz-Damgarten tax office puts the government of Prime Minister Manuela Schwesig (SPD) under strong pressure. The Greens in the state parliament were already demanding personnel consequences on Thursday if Prime Minister Manuela Schwesig (SPD), Finance Minister Heiko Geue (SPD) and Justice Minister Jacqueline Bernhardt (left) did not give plausible answers to questions about the events of the past year. The FDP parliamentary group leader René Domke asked Schwesig to take responsibility.
According to the public prosecutor’s office, the tax officer burned tax files from the controversial Climate Foundation MV in a “short-cut reaction”. A spokesman for the judicial authority in Stralsund, which investigated the case, spoke on Thursday of pressure when searching for the tax papers of the climate foundation in the Ribnitz-Damgarten tax office. When the officer in charge finally discovered the papers and realized that they had been with her for some time, she burned them. Finally, the woman revealed herself to her supervisor, who reported it on May 3, 2022. The case has now become public knowledge through a report in the magazine “Cicero”.
For months, the political public puzzled over where the tax files might have gone. What the Greens are particularly upset: According to the Greens parliamentary group leader Harald Terpe, the finance ministry let the finance committee know in mid-May that there was no information about lost or missing tax documents. In October, the state government refused to provide information on the whereabouts of the files, citing tax secrecy. “Prime Minister Manuela Schwesig must now explain immediately to what extent she was personally informed about the events,” Terpe demanded.
The climate foundation MV – devised to circumvent threatened US sanctions in the construction of the Baltic Sea natural gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 – weighs like a block of stone on Schwesig’s government. The foundation has been criticized for supporting the completion of the gas pipeline.
The magazine “Cicero” writes that there was probably political pressure on the tax authorities. Schwesig and her Finance Minister Heiko Geue (SPD) vehemently contradicted this on Thursday. “There was no political influence on the processors in the tax office,” explained Geue. Schwesig also rejected this. According to Geue, however, there were votes “as part of the technical supervision” to clarify legal issues relating to the taxation of the MV Climate and Environmental Protection Foundation. “Here the tax office has coordinated with the responsible tax department in the Ministry of Finance.”
The case concerned gift taxes on 20 million euros in capital from Nord Stream 2 for the foundation. The documents were subsequently requested and finally a notice of 9.8 million euros in gift tax was issued. In contrast, the Climate Foundation went before the Greifswald Finance Court in autumn 2022. The procedure is still ongoing.
According to the public prosecutor’s office, the tax audit was ultimately not affected by the destruction of the original documents. The proceedings against the tax officer were discontinued on September 20, 2022 against payment of a monetary condition.
The opposition in the Schwerin state parliament doubts Geue’s and Schwesig’s assurances that there was no political pressure. “If it were really as Mr. Geue claims, then the employee would not have burned the documents in panic instead of simply admitting her mistake,” said the chairman of the CDU parliamentary group, Franz-Robert Liskow. “The only way I can explain what the officer did was that the pressure that the Ministry of Finance put on the tax office must have been enormous.” Liskow announced special meetings of the legal and finance committees on the process. Representatives of the FDP, AfD and Greens also sharply criticized the state government.
According to the Stralsund investigators, the case played out like this: The foundation had submitted three gift tax returns to the Rostock tax office, which was not responsible. Therefore, the papers were forwarded to the responsible tax office Ribnitz-Damgarten. Then the documents were no longer found. When they were searched for in the tax office, the accused official did not initially realize that the documents were with her. She then panicked because the original documents had been with her unprocessed for a while and also because of the pressure that had arisen from the search operation.
Geue explained on Thursday that the internal audit of the Ministry of Finance had examined the organizational processes and made the procedures for the tax offices more precise. “We have a proper and well-functioning tax administration,” he stressed. “This is an isolated case.”