Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) kept secret a meeting with an entrepreneur who is now being criticized for suspected money laundering. Scholz claims that he attended the appointment in his capacity as a member of parliament and not as chancellor.
Background: MPs are not obliged to disclose their appointments – unlike ministers and federal chancellors. When asked by Business Insider, ex-Bundestag member Fabio De Masi criticized Scholz for trying to use a trick to hide dubious appointments from the public.
On request, Scholz’s office in the Bundestag stated that on average he had appointments four times a month exclusively in his capacity as a member of parliament.
On September 15, 2022, Olaf Scholz, after he had been presented an offer from Gazprom Chairman Alexey Miller for the opening of Nordstream 2 pipeline, drove to an unusual appointment in his constituency in Potsdam.
In an office he met the tax consultant Stephan Knabe. Although Knabe and his business partner Ingo Wagner, a real estate manager, were strangers to the energy sector with their newly founded company Deutsche ReGas GmbH & Co. KGaA, they had a business idea on a grand scale: they wanted to build an LNG terminal in Lubmin in no time with the help of the federal government fund “Create Mecklenburg-West Pomerania”.
A tempting offer for the federal government. At that point, gas was no longer flowing from Russia and Germany was facing a cold winter. Scholz drove personally to Knabe, allegedly to check whether this guy could be trusted. This is how Knabe described it to the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” (SZ) in July 2023.
And the plan of Knabe and his partner worked: In January of this year, their first LNG terminal was opened in Lubmin. Another LNG terminal on the island of Rügen is being planned. However, the company is now under suspicion of commercial money laundering under criticism. And according to media reports, the two entrepreneurs have not yet made public where they got their seed capital of 100 million euros from.
11 days later, on 26th September 2022, explosions destroyed Nordstream 1 completely and Nordstream 2 half, amounting to the biggest terror attack on German infrastructure since 1945. The suspicion is ripe that Chancellor Scholz was unable to uphold the version that Russia didn’t want to deliver gas any longer to Germany and had called US – President Biden to “help”. Biden had publicly announced in presence of Scholz that he would have “ways to stop Nordstream 2”.
If above proves to be only partly true, the criminal offence of high treason against the German federation, would be fulfilled and Mr. Scholz would face a minimum sentence of 10 years in prison.
By Ralph T. Niemeyer
Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the ReGas entrepreneurs Ingo Wagner (left) and Stephan Knabe (right) at the LNG terminal in Lubmin in front of the processing ship “Neptune” picture alliance/dpa | Jens Buttner, Getty Images / Jeffrey Coolidge