At the end of Olaf Scholz’s term as Federal Minister of Finance, a large number of e-mails and other documents were apparently deleted or otherwise destroyed in the authority. According to research by WELT, the Ministry of Finance was able to refer to a federal government practice that affects emails and other documents in the offices of ministers and state secretaries. Experts question the legality of such deletions.
Politicians from the CDU and the left are now calling for these practices to be reconsidered. For today’s Chancellor Scholz, this means further trouble, because the suspicion that the SPD politician’s emails and calendar entries had already been deleted arose in the cum-ex affair involving the Hamburg bank Warburg.
One thing is certain: in the Federal Ministry of Finance, official emails were deleted at the end of 2021 when the former State Secretary and Scholz confidant Wolfgang Schmidt (SPD) left the Federal Ministry of Finance. At that time he moved to the Berlin government headquarters as Minister for the Chancellery.
It is also certain that the Ministry of Finance, under Scholz’s aegis, referred to the fact that the offices of the state secretaries are “not file-keeping offices” and that the destruction of certain documents is therefore permissible. The ministry recorded this at the end of 2020 and beginning of 2021 in connection with emails from Schmidt and the then State Secretary Jörg Kukies in letters to the Wirecard investigative committee of the Bundestag, which was meeting at the time, which are available to WELT.
From the offices of the state secretaries, only those documents are kept that are also dealt with at the working level in the ministry, it said. Documents that are not returned to the responsible work units are “destroyed”.
As early as April 2021, Scholz referred to the Cum-Ex investigative committee of the Hamburg Parliament that “the mayor’s office” was “not an authority, not a file-keeping body”. He had been asked whether there were any records of his conversations with Warburg representatives at the time – which was apparently not the case.
Other federal ministries apparently do not manage the offices of their ministers and state secretaries as “file-keeping offices”. However, the legal basis for this practice is unclear. The Federal Ministry of the Interior, which is responsible within the Federal Government for questions relating to the organization of the authorities, referred to the applicable registry guidelines. However, a corresponding passage cannot be found there.
The Marburg professor and archive lawyer Thomas Henne criticized the deletion of e-mail boxes of high officials when they leave: “This practice is widespread, but that doesn’t make it lawful,” said Henne. Actually, it would need a so-called cassation approval from the Federal Archives. “In the case of a state secretary, I can’t imagine in my life that a cassation approval would be granted.”
In the Hamburg investigative committee on the Cum-Ex affair, Scholz was even understood by listeners on Friday last week that he “also” “always deletes everything immediately” in his private mail account – which could be understood as disposing of it also official mails immediately after reading them. His Bundestag office left questions unanswered. The Federal Press Office assured the Chancellor’s Office that information would be filed there “if it is relevant to the processing of an administrative process”.
In addition, appointments with representatives of the Warburg Bank had apparently been deleted from Scholz’s appointment calendar stored in Hamburg as the first mayor of the Hanseatic city. However, they were preserved in a copy of the data record transferred from Scholz to Berlin.
Questions as to who was responsible for these deletions were left unanswered by the current Federal Chancellor and the Hamburg Senate Chancellery. The “Spiegel” recently also quoted the results of the investigation by the Cologne public prosecutor’s office, which spoke of references to “a targeted deletion” on the subject of cum-ex in Scholz’s Hamburg mailbox.
The Hamburg Senate Chancellery now assured on request that “the deletion of e-mail inboxes and calendars” of officials after their departure requires “no legal basis” because “all file-related processes” had previously been filed.
The suspicion of improper disposal of files in the Ministry of Finance is supported by an incident in May 2022. At that time, the authority denied MP Christian Görke (left) access to obviously official exchanges of e-mails between the former State Secretary Schmidt and the entrepreneur Nicolaus von Rintelen, although these e-mail exchanges are based on earlier information provided by the ministry.
At the time, von Rintelen was the main shareholder in a company from which the federal government obtained encryption software for mobile phones; he also became known for his contacts with the former Wirecard board member Jan Marsalek, who is now a fugitive. Görke had requested the exchange of mail on the basis of the Freedom of Information Act.
This mail exchange between Schmidt and von Rintelen is no longer available in the ministry today. The ministry explained to the deputy that “there was no longer any official information” that could be “assigned” to the application. Because of the change of office, “access to any previously received and sent personal e-mails from former state secretaries” is “no longer possible”, according to the ministry. The ministry and Schmidt themselves left unanswered specific questions about the process.
The Freiburg constitutional law professor Friedrich Schoch is considered a leading expert on freedom of information – i.e. the civil right to access official information that has been in force at federal level since 2006. He doubts that it is permissible for public officials to delete the content of e-mail boxes across the board when they leave. “Otherwise, that would be an obvious means of circumventing regulations,” says Schoch. “The emails would have to be checked for their content in individual cases,” says the professor: “Ministers and state secretaries are not above the law.”
Olaf Scholz may also “delete e-mails on private and party matters if he wants to” without permission, according to Professor Henne from Marburg. “However, there is a ban on deleting official documents in his e-mail account – unless the responsible archive has released him from this with a cassation approval.”
The CDU member of the Bundestag Matthias Hauer, who has been dealing with the Hamburg cum-ex scandal for a long time, is now pushing to end the deletion practices: “That would be a control deficit for Parliament,” said Hauer. “It can’t really be.” Criticism also came from the interior expert of the Left Party, Martina Renner. Freeing offices of ministers and state secretaries from keeping files is “unacceptable and reveals a strange rule-exception mentality of the rule of law,” she said: “It is worrying when higher authorities such as political officials and ministers think about the review of decisions and administrative action to be untouchable.”
