Cum-Ex Investigation Committee: How Hamburg fails in dealing with tax criminals

ZEIT ONLINE Cum-Ex Investigation Committee: How Hamburg fails in dealing with tax criminals Frank Drieschner • 16 hours • 3 minutes reading time Not enough staff to evaluate the Cum-Ex confession of HSH Nordbank? Hamburg's mayor still calls his finance authority "one of the best in Germany". The question of guilt could not be clarified this Friday in the Hamburg Cum-Ex Investigation Committee. But one thing is clear when in the evening, hours after Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the First Mayor and former Finance Senator Peter Tschentscher also leaves the meeting room in the Citizens' Assembly building next to the Chamber of Commerce after giving his testimony: The citizens and taxpayers of Germany have more reasons to worry than is generally known. Perhaps with one exception: tax criminals can look to the future with confidence. The Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry (PUA) of the Hamburg Parliament has long been concerned with the illegal business of the Warburg Bank and the reasons for the astonishingly lenient attitude of the Hamburg finance authorities in this matter. Now it is dealing with a new topic: the cum-ex business of the then state-owned HSH Nordbank, which has since been privatized and is called Hamburg Commercial Bank. This bank had cheated taxpayers out of millions through cum-ex business, while allowing them to bail it out with billions in public subsidies. And as we now know, there were also so-called cum-cum business. The damage caused by this is in the single or even three-digit million range, depending on how far back you look in times when the legal situation was different. Only two employees were responsible for evaluating the report The Landesbank had confessed to its cum-ex business and explained the situation to the Hamburg finance authorities in a detailed report. After that, one might think, nothing stood in the way of an investigation and the prosecution and punishment of the perpetrators. The problem was: someone had to read, evaluate and check this report. But two government employees were responsible for this, who together filled 1.6 full-time positions - far too few, as one of them reported to the investigative committee. Even in earlier times, more tax officials were responsible for HSH Nordbank. The Finance Senator at the time was Peter Tschentscher, today's First Mayor. He does not deny the shortage - it just couldn't have been better: there was simply no staff. And it is impossible to withdraw staff from one area of ​​the tax administration at will in order to use them elsewhere. When the cum-ex transactions of HSH Nordbank became known, Tschentscher announced that the tax administration would carefully examine the bank's report and draw all necessary conclusions. He has since put it differently. The work of his 1.6 employees at the time, he said, "I see it as an intensive appreciation of the report". For Peter Tschentscher, the Hamburg tax authority is one of "the best in Germany" One has to ask oneself how an authority that is overwhelmed even with a comprehensive confession from a tax evader intends to reach results when it has to investigate the facts in question itself. Anyone living in Hesse or Saxony might consider this process to be a peculiarity of a small city state, but if Peter Tschentscher is right, things are worse elsewhere. "I am convinced," he told the investigative committee on Friday, "that the Hamburg tax authority is one of the best in Germany." In an earlier appearance in the committee, Tschentscher had also explained - from memory, as he now emphasizes - that the HSH Bank had to pay a fine in the millions because of its cum-ex transactions. It is now clear: That was not quite the case. The multi-criminal state bank did indeed have to pay a fine of 22 million euros - but this was not about its cum-ex transactions, but about aiding and abetting tax evasion. She had helped wealthy clients to move money abroad through a letterbox company. The investigations were conducted in North Rhine-Westphalia, not in Hamburg Tschentscher had a long debate with the CDU chairman of the PUA, Richard Seelmaecker, who countered with numerous statements from tax officials who, by their own admission, had never or at most only superficially looked at the report on the conditions at HSH Nordbank. None of them were responsible, was the response. And: "They" - not Seelmaecker, but the Christian Democratic-led Senates of the 2000s - "have built up staff in all possible areas, just not in the tax administration." This had been "made into a staff reduction area".