Olaf Scholz continues to come under pressure in the course of processing the cum-ex scandal surrounding the Hamburg Warburg Bank. Soon he will testify again and will probably have to ask himself questions about his Hamburg party colleague Johannes Kahrs. The entanglements of the long-standing member of the Bundestag raise questions.
Review, autumn 2021: Everything rolls off Olaf Scholz during the election campaign. The many questions about his connections to Christian Olearius, the main owner of the Warburg Bank involved in the Cum-Ex scandal – the SPD man knows how to avoid them. Almost 10 days before the federal elections, FDP politician Florian Toncar spoke to FOCUS Online of a “ticking time bomb”, but Scholz can no longer be stopped on his way to the Chancellery.
Scholz triumphs on September 26, the SPD emerges as the winner of the election. If the SPD manages to form a coalition, Scholz is chancellor. What nobody notices in the midst of the SPD euphoria: on September 28, just two days after the election, investigators search a safe deposit box in a Hamburg savings bank and find 214,000 euros. They belong to the long-time Hamburg SPD top politician Johannes Kahrs. The reports “Tagesspiegel” and “Bild” agree. The origin of the money? Unknown. The public knows nothing about it.
Back in the summer of 2022: Scholz has been Chancellor for a little over seven months and the reports about the discovery of the large sum of cash at Kahrs bring the Warburg Bank case back to the public.
In less than two weeks, the Chancellor is to testify again in the parliamentary committee of inquiry into the cum-ex scandal. The committee of inquiry is investigating whether leading SPD politicians may have influenced the Warburg tax case.
Shortly after the meeting between the then Mayor of Hamburg, Scholz, and the bank’s shareholders in 2016, the tax authorities decided, contrary to the original plan, to waive tax reclaims in the amount of 47 million euros and to let them run into the statute of limitations. A further 43 million euros were only claimed in 2017 after the Federal Ministry of Finance intervened shortly before the statute of limitations expired.
What does Kahrs have to do with the case? For more than 20 years, Kahrs was a directly elected member of the Bundestag from the Hamburg-Mitte constituency – where the Warburg Bank is also based. In May 2020, the SPD parliamentary group’s budget expert abruptly resigned from all political offices. Kahrs is one of more than 1,000 people in the Cum-Ex investigation complex that the Cologne public prosecutor’s office is targeting.
In addition to the logical Hamburg connections, Kahrs has one thing in common with Scholz: both appear in the diary of banker Olearius. According to NDR research, Olearius wrote that Kahrs had promised him “to get an overview in Berlin” of the tax refunds against the Warburg Bank. Kahrs is said to have brokered Scholz’s meetings with Olearius in the first place.
But there are other connections between Kahrs and the Warburg Bank that raise questions. In 2017, Kahrs’ SPD district in Hamburg-Mitte received three donations from the bank’s environment totaling 38,000 euros. At that time, investigations into tax evasion were already underway against Olearius. In the investigative committee of the Hamburg parliament, the treasurer of the state SPD, Christian Bernzen, said in the spring: “We didn’t know at the time that the donors belonged to the Warburg Group.”
In May, WDR also reported on a breakfast in the exclusive “Club of Members of Parliament”, as the German Parliamentary Society is also called in the former Reichstag President’s Palace in Berlin. In April 2019, Kahrs arranged a meeting with Jörg Kukies, State Secretary under the then Finance Minister Olaf Scholz and Olearius. At the time, the banker was still considered a suspect. At breakfast he said he felt he had been treated unfairly. The Hamburg tax authorities were targeting his house. The timing: explosive. Just a few weeks later, the first cum-ex process began in Bonn, in which the bank had to answer as a secondary participant, as reported by WDR.
According to the WDR report, however, there are many indications that Kukies was not informed before the meeting that Olearius would also take part and had only expected Kahrs. This is also how the office of the former Secretary of State looks like.
And then there was the call to the Bafin boss. The former head of the financial supervisory authority, Felix Hufeld, testified in the parliamentary committee of inquiry that the SPD politician had contacted him in September 2016 and again a few weeks later.
The Hamburg SPD MP wanted to know how the bank was doing, said Hufeld, who lost his job last year at the urging of the then Federal Finance Minister Scholz because of the Wirecard scandal. Like all other questioners, he told him “that we do not comment on individual supervisory measures,” said Hufeld. However, Kahrs did not try to get information in an “unsuitable form”.
Kahrs will probably not say anything public about all of this – and in particular about the 214,000 euros found in his safe deposit box. In the investigative committee he had refused to testify with reference to the investigations against him.
The fact that Scholz, who was plagued by large memory gaps when he made his first statement to the investigative committee, will soon appear again for interrogation, does not suit everyone.
The CDU would like to postpone the hearing, the Greens and SPD want to reject it. The background to the requested postponement is that the documents sent by the Cologne public prosecutor’s office, according to the CDU, only have to be evaluated this week.
According to media reports, it is about a WhatsApp chat in which a Hamburg tax officer wrote to a colleague in 2016 – shortly after the tax authorities had decided against a tax refund against the bank – that her “diabolical plan” had worked. There were also indications that messages could have been deleted or recordings manipulated.
It remains to be seen whether the “ticking time bomb” that Scholz took with him to the Chancellery will go off.
