Olaf Scholz's part in the European CumEx mega-scandal has been weighing increasingly heavily on the social democratic chancellor's shoulders for a long time. Key pieces of evidence have disappeared before, but now entire laptops have vanished.

Two laptops suspected to contain evidence regarding the Cum-Ex affair disappeared from a secured safe in Hamburg last week, reports the German Junge Freiheit. About 700,000 e-mails were on the computers, including the entire chat traffic transpiring among Social Democrat (SPD) politicians involved in the scandal. Among them are Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Hamburg Mayor Peter Tschentscher.

According to the indications, one of Scholz’s and Tschentscher’s party colleagues, Steffen Janicke, played a key role. The joint investigation by Stern and the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ) found that he had taken the laptops out of a safe in a heavily guarded file room to which only a few people had access. The opposition suspects that messages on the laptops and other evidence are being tampered with to protect left-wing politicians, including the German chancellor.

Among other things, the Hamburg commission investigating the case is seeking to find out what role Scholz played in one of the biggest financial scandals in German history. M.M.Warburg & CO KGaA, a private German bank based in Hamburg, for example, earned nine-figure sums on so-called Cum-Ex deals until 2021, and the Hamburg city government was also aware of the fraud. In the examined period, Olaf Scholz happened to be the top man of the Hanseatic city.

The Cum-Ex affair has been in the international press for years, as several countries are involved. The case is essentially an investigation into a tax evasion scheme in which the authorities are investigating a complete network comprised of banks, stock traders, lawyers and financial advisers.

The network acquired billions from European treasuries through alleged fraud and speculation related to dividend tax. The states that lost the most money were defrauded of more than $62 billion. At the head of the list is Germany, according to revealed information, the Western European superpower suffered damages of more than thirty-five billion dollars.

The role of Olaf Scholz has already been established on several occasions, but the incriminating evidence has subsequently disappeared multiple times, and at other times he confounded the committee investigating the case with contradictory statements at various hearings. It also came to light that he had outright lied several times during these hearings, for example when he said he did not remember meeting the head of the tax-evading private bank, even though later calendar entries refuted the chancellor’s claims.

A book by Oliver Schrom and Oliver Hollenstein, whose title reads The Scholz Files: The Chancellor, Money and Power in English translation had previously been published, which deals with the Cum-Ex scandal and the role of Olaf Scholz, among others. The book basically seeks answers to two questions: