“Due to the Cum-Ex deals we as citizens have been cheated out of billions – for decades”

Professor Spengel, you were instrumental in uncovering the cum-ex and cum-cum deals. How did the illegal doings come to light?
Individual cases of Cum-Ex transactions were first taken up by tax authorities in 2010/2011. Right from the start, the sums involved were in the three-digit million range, which led to investigations by the public prosecutor's office and brought the cases to the attention among experts. As a result, a whole series of expert articles were written to establish the legality of these transactions. As it later turned out, the authors – among them also professors – had been paid for their papers. In 2015, I wrote a substantial tax law article that broke down the entire chain of argumentation. In April 2016, a committee of inquiry was set up in the Bundestag, which appointed me as an individual expert. The committee was then not only about a legal review of the issues, but also about looking into the matter: How did lobbying associations and tax authorities behave? How has the jurisdiction expressed itself? And who is ultimately to be held responsible? In January of this year, there was a legally binding decision in a Cum-Cum deal, which led to the fact that at the beginning of September I was again questioned as an expert – this time in the Finance Committee of the Bundestag.

In the media, the damage to the German fiscal budget is estimated at 10 billion euros. Does this figure correspond to your estimates?
Nobody knows exactly how high the tax loss is. However, I received data from the German stock exchange Deutsche Börse for the Bundestag's investigative committee for the years 2005 to 2011 and evaluated it with employees. Based on this data, we calculate with 7.2 billion euros in unjustifiably refunded taxes. However, that is the absolute lower limit – because the data was highly aggregated and is only available from 2005 onwards. For the Cum-Cum deals, I also expect a tax loss of 25 billion euros. All in all, we are thus talking about a minimum loss of more than 30 billion euros.

According to a FAZ article from September 10, 2020, only 1.1 billion euros had been reclaimed by the end of 2019. Do you expect that the entire damage will eventually be paid back?
Since it is possible to skim off assets from the parties involved under criminal law, it is quite possible to recover a great deal of money here. This is also because the public prosecutor's office has clear knowledge of the culprits from its investigations. Several banks are affected, including federal state banks. In order to restore as much as possible of the damage done with Cum-Cum deals, the tax authorities must become active and change tax statements in suspicious cases immediately and reverse tax refunds. Only in that way the limitation period can be stopped.

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