History repeats itself.

After the financial crisis of the late 2000s, Gerhard Strate, a renowned criminal defense lawyer from Hamburg, presented himself as a critic of turbo capitalism and shady banking deals.

Now the now 71-year-old lawyer has identified another flawless scandal right on his doorstep with the tax money affair involving the Hamburg Warburg Bank.

Marcus Young

Editor in Business.

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Matthias Wysuwa

Political correspondent for northern Germany and Scandinavia based in Hamburg.

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And as it became known on Thursday, Strate intervened again: he filed criminal charges against the former First Mayor of Hamburg and today's Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his then Senator for Finance Peter Tschentscher, who is now the mayor, because of their role in the Cum-ex affair: In the 38-page advertisement available to the FAZ, he accuses the two Social Democrats of aiding and abetting tax evasion, and Scholz of making false unsworn statements.

There are already several ads

It is not the first report on this complex that the Hamburg public prosecutor's office has received - so far without consequences.

But she immediately caused quite a stir.

Basically, a criminal complaint does not bring anyone before a court, let alone in prison.

Tschentscher and Scholz had rejected all allegations of political influence on the tax authorities and the tax office responsible for MM Warburg.

In his testimony before the parliamentary committee of inquiry into the cum-ex affair in Hamburg at the end of April 2021, Scholz described the allegations as a "horror tale".

Tschentscher has to answer the committee's questions on May 6th.

But Strate's criminal complaint testifies to in-depth knowledge of the cum-ex transactions of the Warburg Bank and its business partners, as well as the internal processes in the tax office for large companies in autumn 2016. Hamburg's Attorney General Jörg Fröhlich, to whom the letter is addressed, is therefore well advised to content and to examine allegations sufficiently - whether there would be any investigations at all depends above all on the confirmation of an initial suspicion.

The question is why the tax authorities and tax office in Hamburg decided in 2016 not to initially reclaim around 47 million euros in taxes from the Warburg-Bank and only had to be instructed to do so by the Federal Ministry of Finance in 2017.

Strate argues that when the decision was made in 2016, Tschentscher, as the finance senator at the time, was also responsible for supervising the tax offices and was therefore obliged to prevent his authority from acting illegally.

"The criminal embedding of these transactions was already obvious in 2016," the ad says, "and no tax court would have been willing to promote their concerns."

Statements are "unbelievable"

Strate also accuses today's Chancellor of his statements in the Hamburg investigative committee, according to which he has no memories of certain meetings and discussions with top bank representatives in 2016 and 2017, being "unbelievable".

In any case, Strate's sense of justice and his perseverance are very strong.

Based on his private outrage about dubious transactions by the top managers of the former HSH Nordbank (today Hamburg Commercial Bank), investigations only got rolling more than a decade ago.

The bank bosses around Dirk Jens Nonnenmacher had approved the high-risk transactions by circulation without examining them in detail.

The fact that they were before a criminal court can be traced back to a single person who reported them: Gerhard Strate.