A lawyer for the main suspect Hanno Berger holds a file in his hand in the courtroom before the start of the trial for “Cum-Ex” share deals.
(Photo: dpa)
Dusseldorf When the Handelsblatt published my first article on Cum-Ex tax fraud in June 2014, Massimo Bognanni and I were working in the same team. I got to know Massimo as an extremely enthusiastic colleague. When the editors asked me to review his new book on the cum-ex scandal, I gladly agreed.
The reading was worth it. Chapter after chapter, Bognanni brings to life the characters that have become so familiar to me over time. The tax lawyer Hanno Berger, whom I visited eight years ago in hiding from the German judiciary in Switzerland. Public prosecutor Anne Brorhilker, who stirs up the international banking world from a dilapidated building in Cologne-Sülz. The CDU politician Peter Biesenbach, who once told me that he only became aware of the dimensions of the cum-ex fraud after he was elected Minister of Justice of North Rhine-Westphalia.
This names a problem that Bognanni addresses several times in his book. Cum-Ex, the great tax robbery, is not anchored in the public consciousness.
In the summer of 2017, when Biesenbach did not really know how to assess the Cum-Ex damage, a German Bundestag committee of inquiry had been working on the issue for more than a year and had just presented a final report. More than a thousand articles had been written, and banks had repaid hundreds of millions of euros to the tax authorities.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
Bognanni hopes his book will “enlighten the machinations behind Cum-Ex so that a larger audience will begin to understand this biggest tax scandal”. That’s ambitious. Bognanni now works at West German Broadcasting. His TV documentary “The Billion Robbery. A prosecutor hunts down the tax mafia” was highly praised. If you haven’t seen this film or the countless articles on the subject, you might as well leave Bognanni’s book on the shelf.
Massimo Bognanni: Under the eyes of the state
dtv
Munich 2022
288 pages
20.00 euros
That would be a shame. Bognanni’s big offer is to tell the Cum-Ex affair in one go. His timing is ideal. The tax lawyer Hanno Berger, who proudly presented his cum-ex expertise to me in the Swiss mountain village of Zuoz in 2014, has just been extradited to Germany.
The Bonn Regional Court closed the first three cum-ex proceedings with guilty verdicts. The Federal Court of Justice, as the last instance, confirmed the criminal liability of the transactions at the expense of the taxpayer.
Bognanni shows that the spook could have ended 30 years ago. In 1991, the Hessian Stock Exchange Supervisor August Schäfer discovered a practice of banks to enrich themselves from the Treasury. In an essay for the “Frankfurter Finanzbericht” Schäfer wrote about tax receipts for taxes “that were not paid at all”.
The paper was published by the State Central Bank of Hesse, there could not have been a more suitable place for publication. But although the Ministry of Economics ordered an investigation and the public prosecutor’s office recommended investigations, the senior public prosecutor’s office, in consultation with the Ministry of Finance, refrained from doing so. Reason: It would have been too much effort.
Bognanni describes actors impressively
Bognanni’s book is packed with such hair-raising details. In 1998, Cum-Ex was accelerated through an automation process. In 2002 the topic came up in the Federal Ministry of Finance. But when trying to stop the practice, politicians let the lobbying association of banks lead their pen. Again, the double tax refund ploy continued unchecked. Something similar happened in 2007 and 2009.
In the search for those responsible, Bognanni impressively describes perpetrators, enlighteners and failures. The perpetrators are in the majority, the scouts are far behind.
In November 2015, the Handelsblatt reported in a cover story on cum-ex transactions by the state-owned WestLB. Bognanni received the same answer from the bank in 2021 as we had six years earlier: nobody could see it. Dozens of employees were informed. The fact that the board of directors and the supervisory board, which is peppered with NRW politicians, did not want to know anything about it, is no proof of their expertise.
Bognanni writes entertainingly. There are always highlights when he lets his readers look over the shoulder of prosecutor Brorhilker as she investigates. The way in which Bognanni traces the main lines of the affair, how he describes the perpetrators in their arrogance and the admonishers in their failure, is exciting and revealing.
Others have noticed this too. The Berlin production company Eikon has just acquired the film rights to Bognanni’s book. A true crime series is planned. There are enough super-rich villains and one would like to wish many a “crime scene” with such an unperturbed investigator as Brorhilker.
More: Two courts in competition for cum-ex string puller Hanno Berger.