According to his spokesman, Chancellor Olaf Scholz knew nothing of a possible large sum of cash in the possession of former SPD member of the Bundestag Johannes Kahrs. He can rule that out, said government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit on Monday in Berlin.
At the end of next week, Scholz will again answer the questions of the investigative committee on the so-called cum-ex scandal surrounding the Hamburg Warburg Bank. “Everything that needs to be said will be dealt with there, too,” said Hebestreit.
In the tax affair, the pressure on Scholz had increased in the past few days. Opposition politicians from the Union and the Left Party demanded that he comment on the latest findings of the investigation.
According to the “Bild” newspaper, a large sum of money is said to have been found in a locker belonging to former SPD politician Johannes Kahrs as part of the Cum-Ex investigations – the possession of which is not illegal in itself. The Cologne public prosecutor’s office responsible for the investigation initially did not comment on this when asked. Kahrs has not yet been available for comment and has not responded to inquiries.
“It is not at all clear where the Kahrs got the money from and to what extent the social democratic network in Hamburg benefited from these events,” Hamburg’s CDU leader Christoph Ploß told the “Spiegel”. “Here, the SPD at federal level also has a duty to finally clarify things. Olaf Scholz and (Hamburg’s mayor) Peter Tschentscher must contribute to the clarification. Both must no longer go underground,” he demanded.
Former left-wing member of the Bundestag Fabio De Masi wrote on Twitter: “Either Kahrs proves the origin of the money or he invokes his right to remain silent because of the Cum-Ex investigations against him.” In the latter case, De Masi concluded, it stands to reason that the money was linked to the cum-ex case “and the chancellor has a problem too.”
At Kahrs in Hamburg there was a raid last year in connection with the Cum-Ex scandal, as the German Press Agency learned from informed circles at the time. Because of the initial suspicion of favoritism against three suspects, investigators had searched not only private rooms but also the premises of the Hamburg tax authority, the Cologne public prosecutor said at the time.
Investigations to date have “given evidence of criminally relevant behavior on the part of the accused in connection with the ‘cum/ex transactions’ of a Hamburg-based bank that are the subject of the proceedings”.
In the case of cum-ex transactions, financial players shifted blocks of shares with (“cum”) and without (“ex”) dividend entitlement around the dividend date in a complicated system and then had taxes reimbursed several times. The Hamburg investigative committee is to clarify whether leading SPD politicians are influencing tax decisions at the Warburg Bank, which was involved in the scandal.
The background is, among other things, meetings between the then mayor Scholz and the shareholders of the bank, Christian Olearius and Max Warburg, in 2016 and 2017. Scholz had stated that he could not remember the meetings, but categorically ruled out any political influence.