Starting Monday, Hamburg banker Christian Olearius will have to answer the court for cum-ex transactions.
(Photo: dpa)
Bonn A trial against the Hamburg banker Christian Olearius begins this Monday (10 a.m.) to deal with the billion-dollar cum-ex tax scandal. The 81-year-old partner of the private bank Warburg is accused of 13 cases of particularly serious tax evasion before the Bonn regional court, which relate to the period 2006 to 2013
There is also another accusation of evasion: from 2016 to 2019, Olearius is said to have tried to prevent back taxes by providing false information. The public prosecutor’s office estimates the tax damage at a total of 280 million euros.
The defendant Olearius has always denied the allegations in the past. According to his spokesman, he did not want to comment before the trial began. A total of 28 days of negotiations are planned until March 2024. The former Warburg boss faces up to ten years in prison.
The former head of the bank is said to have looked into cum-ex strategies in detail and approved corresponding transactions. According to the indictment, he was involved in all planning and knew all the processes and key decisions.
He was also responsible for signing tax returns, as a result of which taxes were refunded that had not previously been paid.
Meeting with Olaf Scholz
As part of the attempt to prevent the additional tax payment, Olearius met in 2016 and 2017 with the then head of Hamburg City Hall and now Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD).
After the meetings, the Hamburg tax authorities initially waived the reclaims, despite initially having different plans, which meant that the unlawful refund of capital gains taxes amounting to 47 million euros expired. A further 43 million euros were only claimed in 2017 following repeated instructions from the Federal Ministry of Finance shortly before the statute of limitations began. According to its own statements, the bank later settled all claims.
Suspicion of political influence
The question of whether there was political influence on the Hamburg tax administration at the time was already the subject of investigative committees in the Bundestag and the Hamburg citizenship. Scholz answers the question in the negative, but cites gaps in his memory regarding the meeting with Olearius. The Bonn trial may also provide insights into this explosive issue – the name Scholz appears several times in the detailed indictment against Olearius.
“The Warburg Bank turned to Olaf Scholz to obtain a tax statute of limitations for the crime as it was no longer able to proceed through the legal authorities,” says former left-wing member of the Bundestag Fabio De Masi. The Bonn trial is important for the defensive constitutional state. “Cum-ex transactions are the most serious form of organized crime.” He expects “insight and remorse” from Olearius.
With this business model, banks and other financial players created a confusing game for the tax authorities with stocks with (“cum”) and without (“ex”) dividend claims. In total, the federal government was cheated out of a double-digit billion euro amount. The Federal Court of Justice classified the transactions as a criminal offense in 2021. There have already been several convictions. The lawyer Hanno Berger, one of the driving forces behind the business model, received two prison sentences.
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