Dusseldorf The scandal surrounding the double refund of capital gains tax paid only once is spreading further. According to information from the Handelsblatt from legal circles, around 80 tax investigators, police officers and public prosecutors are searching the offices of the Japanese investment bank Nomura in Frankfurt. Officials from the Federal Central Tax Office are also involved in the raid.
“The Cologne public prosecutor’s office has been executing a search warrant against an investment bank based in Asia since yesterday in Frankfurt am Main,” a spokesman for the lead public prosecutor’s office in Cologne told the Handelsblatt on Wednesday, without naming the institute. “The measures are related to cum-ex transactions that are the subject of the proceedings and related tax evasion models.”
That Nomura is said to have been involved in illegal Cum-Ex brand deals is not new. The Japanese were already on a list of 130 financial institutions that a whistleblower sold to the Wuppertal tax investigation department in 2014.
The current search now serves “in particular to find relevant communication in the form of e-mails and other written correspondence,” said the spokesman for the Cologne public prosecutor’s office. The investigation is directed against 37 Accused persons who worked or are working for the bank or its subsidiaries.
According to the findings of the judiciary, Nomura appeared in the Cum-Ex affair, among other things, as a short seller of shares – and thus plays a key role. The bank is also on a list of cum-ex mandates from the law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer.
Nomura took over an important part
Transactions with Dekabank in 2020 are known from court proceedings. Nomura sold Dekabank shares that she didn’t even have. The short sale was part of the confusion that led the tax authorities to double-refund capital gains tax.
Dekabank has also already been searched – in June 2022. This was preceded by a year-long legal dispute led by the then chief lawyer Elisabeth Roegele. After a failed cum-ex deal, she tried to sue the tax office for the lost profit.
The lawsuit failed in 2016. Roegele was no longer there – she switched to the Bafin financial supervisory authority in 2015. She resigned there in 2021 as part of the Wirecard affair, and today Roegele advises a Swiss investment boutique.
There were apparently close agreements between Deka and Nomura when it came to Cum-Ex. The Handelsblatt has Bloomberg chat logs. The traders work with Bloomberg terminals and also communicate through them.
After a series of cum-ex deals, a Nomura dealer wrote on July 20, 2010: “Actually, we can count on pretty good for 2011, right? lol”. His counterpart at Deka replied: “Nice arithmetic says it all.” The answer: “You know what I mean.”
According to the findings of the Cologne public prosecutor, Nomura came to its position in the cum-ex business primarily through an acquisition: In 2008, the Japanese financial group took over the Asian business and the investment banking division of the insolvent US investment bank Lehman Brothers in Europe and the Middle East.
Lehman team switched to Nomura
Many cum-ex specialists joined Nomura with Lehman. They picked up where they left off at Lehman. Lehman was among the biggest short sellers in the market. Your insolvency administrator later paid 48 million euros to the judiciary in North Rhine-Westphalia – a result of the cum-ex deals.
Nomura is still at the beginning of the process. The money house was not only active as a short seller but also as a broker – and as a financier of cum-ex deals. For them, an immense investment of money was necessary. Equity of 50 million euros was partially leveraged by a factor of 20. A bank provided one billion euros for a single deal. There have been a number of such transactions every dividend season.
Cum-ex deals have always been illegal. However, it took the legislator many years to technically prevent them. From 2012 they were no longer possible, at least not in the classic form. In the banking scene, however, it is an open secret that some stock specialists found new ways to reach into the tax coffers. The Cum-Ex successor models were also essentially about having more capital gains tax paid out by the state than was paid in.
The raid on Nomura suggests that the European unit of the Japanese investment giant had specialists of this type in its ranks. The investigations are about the years from 2007. They extend to the present.
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