This Friday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz had to face lawmakers' questions for the second time in Hamburg in front of the investigative committee on the “Cum-Ex” financial scandal. In the course of this, international reporting picked up on the calculations of Mannheim's tax professor Christoph Spengel, who estimates the total loss for taxpayers in Germany at ten billion euros.
Reports on the financial scandal were published in international media (e.g. nasdaq.com, fundscene.com, euronews.com). In the special programme “Frontal” on the Hamburg Cum/
Christoph Spengel has been publishing expert essays on the illegality of cum-ex transactions since 2015. In doing so, he helped initiate the uncovering and prosecution of the fraudulent billion-dollar transactions. Since 2016, he has acted several times as an expert and reviewer for the Committee of Inquiry (Cum/Ex) of the German Bundestag; since 2018, he has repeatedly been invited to public hearings as an expert for the European Parliament. Prof. Spengel has made an estimate of the tax damage caused by the Cum-Ex/Cum-Cum transactions. Since 2019, he has also been a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the “Bunds Deutscher Kriminalbeamter”.