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The owners of the Hamburg Warburg Bank, Max Warburg and Christian Olearius, insist on inspection of files before a testimony before the Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry into the Cum-Ex scandal. If the Hamburg citizenship does not grant the bank the rights to be affected, the case will be taken to the Federal Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights, said Olearius' lawyer Peter Gauweiler in the committee on Friday. The Administrative Court and the Higher Administrative Court of Hamburg have already rejected this request.
The bank was seriously affected, said the former CSU member of the Bundestag in Hamburg's city hall. “You can't be a victim.” Accordingly, she must also have the right to ask questions and to apply, as well as the right to inspect files. Should this be admitted, his client Olearius will be personally available to the committee - Gauweiler assured each individual member, also in personal conversations.
Warburg's lawyer - the columnist and former presiding judge at the Federal Court of Justice Thomas Fischer - criticized that his client and Olearius should be made scapegoats.
He and Gauweiler said that the Warburg Bank had obviously been identified as the simplest opponent: a small bank, headquartered in Germany and tangible bosses.
Gauweiler referred, for example, to an email from the banking supervisory authority Bafin from the end of January 2016, according to which only Warburg Bank had so far been noticed in connection with Cum Ex.
Gauweiler emphasized that numerous other cases had long been known.
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The parliamentary committee of inquiry wants to clarify the allegation of a possible influence of leading SPD politicians on the tax treatment of the Warburg Bank.
The background to this are meetings between the then mayor, Olaf Scholz, and Olearius in 2016 and 2017. At that time, investigations were already underway against Olearius on suspicion of serious tax evasion.
The city later allowed possible additional tax claims of 47 million euros to be statute-barred, a further 43 million euros was only claimed after the Federal Ministry of Finance intervened.
In the meantime, the bank has paid all claims, but this is not an admission of debt, as it emphasizes.
Scholz had only admitted the meeting with Olearius retrospectively and referred to gaps in memory.
Previously, entries from Olearius' diary had become known, which indicated the meetings and a possible special treatment of the bank by the tax authorities.
The current mayor, Peter Tschentscher (SPD), was the Senator of Finance at the time.
Scholz is to be questioned by the committee next Friday.
The schedule presented by the SPD and the Greens provides for a further questioning of Scholz and Tschentscher on December 17th.
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Attorney Fischer pointed out that there was no final judgment against the bank, and also did not spare criticism of the media, some of which were prejudging Olearius and Warburg.
His client never had any influence in the Senate.
In addition, Warburg and Olearius never tried to influence the decisions of the tax authorities in a legally questionable manner.
Fischer referred to a statement by Olearius that had already been read out last week and that Warburg fully endorsed.
"We have neither knowingly nor willingly participated in illegal cum-ex deals," it says.
Rather, as the custodian bank, Deutsche Bank must be asked whether it was guilty of breach of trust, since the Warburg bank had paid it the taxes resulting from its transactions. This legal opinion was presented at the meeting with Scholz. "It was not about favoritism for us." Attorney Gauweiler suggested that numerous other witnesses should be questioned, including ex-Deutsche Bank boss Hilmar Kopper, the former Hamburg finance senators Herlind Gundelach, Michael Freytag and Carsten Frigge (all CDU) as well as ex-Bafin boss Jochen Sanio.