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In the dispute over the questioning of the Warburg Bank owners Max Warburg and Christian Olearius by the parliamentary committee of inquiry into the Cum-Ex tax money affair, the Hamburg Administrative Court rejected an urgent application by the two.

The bankers had opposed being questioned by the Citizenship Committee this Friday.

They demanded to be able to see all of the body's files first.

"In the opinion of the administrative court, the applicants do not have a right to inspect files that would have to be granted in the run-up to their opinion before the parliamentary committee of inquiry, which is scheduled for April 16, 2021," said a court spokesman on Wednesday.

The two plaintiffs had already lodged a complaint with the Higher Administrative Court against the decision (19 E 1769/21).

The investigative committee wants to clarify the allegation of the possible influence of leading SPD politicians on the tax treatment of the Hamburg Warburg Bank involved in the "Cum-Ex" scandal.

The background to this are meetings between the mayor at the time, Olaf Scholz, and Olearius in 2016 and 2017, against whom investigations were underway on suspicion of serious tax evasion.

Hamburg's current First Mayor Peter Tschentscher (SPD) was Finance Senator at the time.

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Hamburg later allowed possible additional tax claims of 47 million euros to become statute-barred, and a further 43 million euros was only claimed after the Federal Ministry of Finance intervened.

In the meantime, Warburg Bank has paid all tax claims, but this is not an admission of guilt, as it emphasized.