Germany’s conservative opposition Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) announced on Tuesday that they would demand a parliamentary inquiry into the tax evasion scandal involving Hamburg’s Warburg bank, which also will investigate the role played in this scandal by the current Social Democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who at the time was mayor-governor of the city-state of Hamburg.

The scandal called “CumEx files” is related to a tax optimization scheme developed by banks, including the Warburg bank. For years, banks and investors, resorting to a series of financial maneuvers, received tax refunds from the Treasury that they never actually paid. According to estimates, losses to the German treasury amounted to approximately 36 billion euros in the period 2000-2020, the EFE news agency reported, citing Agerpres.

Olaf Scholz, as the mayor of Hamburg, in 2016 and 2017 had meetings with Christian Olearios and Max Warburg, heads of the Warburg bank. In 2016, the tax office of the city of Hamburg refused to collect an amount of 47 million euros received by the Warburg bank due to illegal transactions carried out with the help of a tax optimization scheme. Another debt in the amount of 43 million euros was declared only after pressure from the Ministry of Finance and after a court decision.

The CDU/CSU alliance believes that the tax office initially wanted to demand the payment of 47 million euros, but then changed its mind, and wants to find out through a parliamentary investigation whether the refusal to collect this amount is related to the relevant meetings. Scholz

The current chancellor has been under pressure for a long time because of this scandal. The regional parliament in Hamburg has already launched its own investigation, during which its own committee questioned Scholz several times. Before this commission, he claimed that he did not remember meetings with Olearius and Warburg. But documents from the Bundestag (the lower house of Germany’s federal parliament) show he provided details of those meetings during a 2020 finance committee hearing.

• The e-mails of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz were checked by the police

The creation of an investigative commission in the Bundestag requires the votes of at least 25% of the total number of deputies, so the CDU/CSU has enough votes to launch it.​

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