A week before the election, the CDU and CSU declare the fight against money laundering to be a matter of the heart. You are trying to put the SPD’s candidate for chancellor under pressure. The Union is even considering disregarding the coalition agreement. But the strategy could become an own goal.
Neither Olaf Scholz nor the SPD or the Union can claim that they have not known about the deficits in the anti-money laundering unit FIU for years. Fabio de Masi, financial expert of the Left Party in the Bundestag, has demonstrably warned of “chaos” in the authority at the beginning of the electoral term. In June 2018, his group called for measures in the FIU to speed up the processing of suspicious transaction reports. The application went completely under, the parliament was quorate. Too many MPs were missing – especially from the grand coalition. The CDU, CSU and SPD “denied” the problems at the time, says de Masi, still angry in retrospect.
It is now clear that the inadequacies also contributed to the Wirecard fiasco. Dozens of references to trickery in the scandal group remained unprocessed by the Cologne authority or were not recognized as relevant. In the meantime, the Union has shown increased interest in the misery. Suddenly she can’t go fast enough to investigate the cause. The CDU and CSU insist that Scholz will answer questions from the Bundestag Finance Committee on Monday at a special meeting that the opposition parties FDP, Greens and Left have jointly requested.
There are “serious allegations of failures in the fight against money laundering in the room,” said the deputy leader of the Union parliamentary group, Andreas Jung. Scholz should provide clarification instead of campaigning in Baden-Württemberg as planned. The background is searches in the Federal Ministry of Finance in connection with investigations by the Osnabrück public prosecutor’s office against employees of the FIU. She wants to see e-mails between the authority and the ministry to clarify whether the FIU passed on information from banks about terrorist financing to the police and the judiciary too late, which is why planned acts could not be detected. The investigations are not directed against Scholz or officials in his department.
Is the Union breaking the coalition agreement?
The chief public prosecutor in Osnabrück is a CDU member with political ambitions. The Social Democrats therefore suspect an inadmissible instrumentalization of the actually independent judiciary for election campaign purposes. You ask: Is the Union concerned or does it want to trip Scholz on the way to the Chancellery? Jens Zimmermann, SPD member of the finance committee, calls it an “absurd drama that the Union and the opposition are currently performing”. It is problematic to prevent the top candidate of a party from campaigning. “But clearly: As always, Scholz will answer all questions in detail.” The finance minister will be connected digitally.
But it is not that simple. It is quite possible that Scholz will be quoted personally in the committee. Since the specific case involves monetary transactions, the conversations could quickly turn to business secrets that need to be protected. Then the committee would have to move to a bug-proof room. “In that case, Scholz would have to appear because it cannot be done via video,” says FDP financial expert Florian Toncar. His party is for it. But Scholz could not be forced. “That is only possible with a majority vote.”
Since the SPD is currently against the summoning of its candidate for chancellor, it depends on the Union. If she agrees with the opposition, it would be disregarding the coalition agreement. There it says: “In the Bundestag and in all of the bodies it has appointed, the coalition factions vote uniformly.” Matthias Hauer, CDU member of the finance committee, says that a “short visit by Scholz via video would be an affront. The opposition and the Union have a lot of questions.” Does that mean that the CDU and CSU will vote against the SPD if necessary? The Union will still advise, said Hauer.
Risk based approach
De Masi steps on the brakes: “I am in favor of only bringing Scholz in when he refuses to answer things in a non-secret session.” More important than “a big election show” are sensible proposals to combat money laundering and information about a letter from the Justice Ministry, which is also run by the SPD, on the “risk-based approach”. This suggests that the finance department has deliberately tolerated that suspected crimes that are not attributable to money laundering and terrorist financing are not passed on to other investigators.
The FIU uses the risk-based approach so that the law enforcement authorities are not flooded with inconsequential tips. It is a kind of filter system with which the anti-money laundering unit sifts out relevant information and forwards it to state criminal investigation offices, for example. However, there is a suspicion that the grid is set incorrectly. Federal states, including those ruled by the SPD, have been complaining for years that as a result of the action they have hardly received any information from the FIU.
“At Wirecard, 32 of 34 relevant reports slipped through,” says FDP politician Toncar and explains: “The risk-based approach has evidently created a colossal legal vacuum.” Scholz made no move to close it. The poor staffing of the FIU go back to decisions of the CDU politician Wolfgang Schäuble, who was finance minister before Scholz. The sieving process, however, is “Scholz’s sole responsibility”. If there was an instruction from his ministry to ignore certain constellations in the grid, this could have favored criminal offenses.
Zimmermann of the SPD describes this as “further campaign noise”. He tries to give the impression of serenity. “We are not worried about the content,” says the social democrat. On the contrary: The SPD will use the meeting to question the behavior of the Union. For example, what the Lower Saxony public prosecutor’s office tried to get information and clarify the facts “before they approached the Federal Ministry of Finance with a lot of fanfare”. Zimmermann believes “the process could be an embarrassing story for the Union”.