Laptops in the "cum-ex" committee temporarily disappeared
Confusion in the "Cum-Ex" investigation committee of the Hamburg Parliament about the whereabouts of two laptops with thousands and thousands of allegedly explosive emails: they were originally stored in a safe in a room specially set up for confidential committee documents. The devices were then in other "secure rooms" for days - they are now back in the safe. This was explained by the head of the working group, Steffen Jänicke (SPD), at the meeting of the committee members on Friday, CDU chairman Richard Seelmaecker told the German Press Agency.
Speculation that the SPD-appointed chief investigator Steffen Jänicke had hidden the laptops was dismissed as "complete nonsense" by the chairman of the committee of inquiry, Mathias Petersen (SPD). He told dpa that he had merely kept them safe because it still had to be clarified how to deal with the large amounts of data on the laptops, which had nothing to do with the "cum-ex" scandal. The members of the committee were also informed of this two weeks ago. Petersen spoke of a "storm in a teacup".
According to reports in Stern and WAZ, the two laptops contain more than 700,000 emails, including from Olaf Scholz's office manager Jeanette Schwammberger, Hamburg's mayor Peter Tschentscher (SPD) and numerous top officials. They were confiscated by the public prosecutor's office in Cologne as part of the investigation into the "cum-ex" scandal and handed over to the committee of inquiry after a long political tug-of-war.
The committee is to investigate possible influence exerted by leading Hamburg SPD politicians on the tax treatment of Warburg Bank. The background to this are three meetings between the bank's co-owners Christian Olearius and Max Warburg with the then mayor and current Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) in 2016 and 2017.
After the first meetings, the tax office for large companies initially waived tax reclaims of 47 million euros against the bank in 2016 when the statute of limitations expired. A further 43 million euros were only claimed in 2017 on the instructions of the Federal Ministry of Finance shortly before the statute of limitations expired. According to Scholz, he can no longer remember the content of the talks, but rules out any influence on the tax treatment of the Hamburg private bank.
CDU chairman Seelmaecker was surprised by the temporary disappearance of the laptops. According to his recollection, the SPD chairman of the committee of inquiry, Milan Pein, had complained that the emails included correspondence that had nothing to do with the committee and had to remain under lock and key. It was then agreed that one member of staff from each parliamentary group would look through the mail structures and make suggestions on how to deal with them. This was also done. It is unclear why the laptops were then taken away by Jänicke.
Opposition circles are concerned that one reason may be that the SPD wanted to see what was hidden in the laptops in advance and away from the parliamentary public eye due to the potentially explosive nature of the emails. It is also possible that the contents of the laptops were even copied in order to gain an information advantage. The AfD parliamentary group is already calling for a special meeting of the committee. "This is a new dimension in the cum-ex scandal in which the SPD is involved," said AfD chairman Alexander Wolf. The suspicion arises that the SPD wants to block and prevent the investigation.
- The committee members are currently debating how to manage the large amounts of financial data on the laptops, which could potentially impact the citizens' understanding of their representatives' interactions with banks and taxes related to the "cum-ex" scandal.
- Understanding the financial implications of the emails contained in the laptops, such as tax reclamations and their impact on the city's banks, is crucial for assessing potential conflicts of interest involved in the "cum-ex" investigation.
Source: www.dpa.com
