Dusseldorf There are five letters that have burned themselves into the public consciousness: Cum-Ex. Banks and tax attorneys invented a way to get themselves and their wealthy customers back more taxes than they paid. The damage for the taxpayer: twelve billion euros.
The investigation into this scandal has been going on for many years. The first verdicts are now in. More than 100 procedures involving more than 1,500 suspects are still pending.
The Handelsblatt has now identified a group that need not worry: board members and supervisory boards of state banks. These financial institutions also participated in cum-ex deals, and they also grabbed into the tax coffers. Only: the judiciary is holding back strangely.
State politicians sat on the supervisory boards of state banks. LBBW in Baden-Württemberg, for example, paid back 200 million euros from illegal cum-ex transactions years ago. In 2013, the public prosecutor’s office in Stuttgart began investigations. But even nine years later there is no progress.
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This is mainly due to the fact that only a lone prosecutor investigates. According to research by the Handelsblatt, the judiciary in Stuttgart has relied on just one investigator in the pursuit of the largest tax scandal in the region for nine years. Although the issues to be clarified are particularly complex, they do not want to request more staff.
So those responsible can lean back. Former LBBW boss Siegfried Jaschinski told Handelsblatt that he only found out about the cum-ex deals in his bank from the newspaper. Political figures such as Stefan Mappus and Stuttgart’s Mayor Wolfgang Schuster sat on the LBBW Board of Directors. Neither answered any questions. LBBW supervisor Heinz Dürr said: “During my time on the board of directors of LBBW, the topic of cum-ex was not discussed.”
The boardrooms in Landesbanken remain a judiciary-free zone. In this episode of Handelsblatt Crime we illuminate them. A bonus track: news from the courtroom of the district court in Bonn. There Hanno Berger, Mister Cum-Ex, has just made a confession. Or not…
Handelsblatt Crime appears every 14 days and can be heard wherever there are podcasts.
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More: You can hear the last episode of Handelsblatt Crime here