In the multi-billion dollar “Cum-Ex” tax scandal, there was another raid on a bank in Frankfurt. A spokeswoman for the US Institute J.P. Morgan announced on Wednesday that investigators visited the money house’s offices in the financial center this week. One continues to cooperate with the German authorities, it said. She did not give any further details. The finance agency Bloomberg previously reported.
The public prosecutor’s office in Cologne announced that they have been executing search warrants against a bank in Frankfurt and against auditing and tax consulting firms in connection with “cum-ex” proceedings since Tuesday. In addition to representatives of the public prosecutor’s office, around 55 investigators from the Münster criminal police and other police departments, tax investigators, the Federal Central Tax Office and IT experts were said to be involved. The public prosecutor’s office did not name the bank searched.
Many banks are involved in the “Cum-Ex” scandal. Investors used a loophole in the law to cheat the Treasury out of taxes for years. Banks and other investors pushed shares with (“cum”) and without (“ex”) dividend rights back and forth around the dividend record date.
In the end, tax offices reimbursed capital gains taxes that had not been paid at all. The state suffered an estimated double-digit billion in damage. In 2012 the tax loophole was closed. In the summer of 2021, the Federal Court of Justice ruled that “cum-ex” transactions are to be assessed as tax evasion.
Several public prosecutors and courts are working on the scandal. The Cologne public prosecutor’s office is putting the pressure on. In the past few months, she has already searched the offices of the US banks Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, the major British bank Barclays, the Swedish bank SEB and Dekabank in Frankfurt.
A driving force behind the “cum-ex” deals in Germany, tax attorney Hanno Berger, has to answer to the district courts of Wiesbaden and Bonn on suspicion of tax evasion.
Chancellor Scholz answers questions from the committee of inquiry into the Cum-Ex scandal. Not much could be elicited from Scholz. “It is incomprehensible that Scholz does not want to remember any content,” says Mathias Middelberg, deputy chairman of the Union faction.
Source: WORLD
