Frankfurt: German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, the frontrunner in the race to succeed Chancellor Angela Merkel, will face a grilling from lawmakers on Monday over a probe into an anti-money laundering agency overseen by his ministry.
The appearance before the parliament’s finance committee will come merely days before a September 26 general election that will see Merkel bow out after 16 years in power. "Olaf Scholz has accepted our invitation to appear before the finance committee before the election," said Green party MP Lisa Paus on Wednesday, calling it his "last chance to regain lost credibility".
Scholz’s centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) is currently leading opinion polls, followed by Merkel’s conservative CDU-CSU alliance whose chancellor candidate Armin Laschet has seen a steady decline in popularity.
Lawmakers from opposition parties have asked to put questions before Scholz after his ministry and the justice ministry were raided by prosecutors last week as part of an investigation into the Cologne-based Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU).
The agency, the anti-money laundering section of Germany’s customs authority, is suspected of hushing up reports of potential money laundering and failing to pass along tips to the relevant authorities.
Political rivals have seized on the searches to criticise Scholz, seeing the probe as the latest example of the minister falling short of his oversight duties. Scholz’s ministry had already come under fire for apparently failing to act on early warning signs of fraudulent activity at payments company Wirecard, which collapsed last year after admitting that 1.9 billion euros was missing from its accounts.
At a televised election debate on Sunday, Scholz’s main rival Laschet said the minister had to take responsibility for regulatory failures that happened on his watch. But Scholz said last week’s searches were just about assisting prosecutors with their inquiry into the FIU and did not involve the ministry directly.
Scholz also defended his handling of the Wirecard fallout, saying he had spearheaded a massive overhaul at Germany’s finance watchdog as a result.Meanwhile, suspected hackers last month briefly disrupted the website of the authority running Germany’s September 26 general election, a spokesman for the body told AFP on Wednesday.
The development, first reported by Business Insider, comes as German federal prosecutors probe alleged cyber attacks against lawmakers during the campaign to choose a new parliament and a successor to Chancellor Angela Merkel.
"At the end of August the website of the Federal Returning Officer only had limited accessibility for a few minutes due to a malfunction," the spokesman said when asked about the hacking report.
"The problem was analysed and the technical concepts were further developed accordingly. The information for the public through the website of the Federal Returning Officer was and is ensured."
Business Insider reported that the website, which publishes the official results of the vote, was bombarded with data requests in a so-called distributed denial of service attack, leading the servers to break down.
Citing government sources, it said that IT systems necessary for the election itself to go off smoothly were not affected, possibly due to extra protections in place. The federal prosecutor’s office said last week it had opened "an investigation on suspicion of espionage" over accusations made by the German government about "phishing" attacks against MPs by Russian intelligence.
Berlin has pointed the finger at hackers from Russia’s "Ghostwriter" group which reportedly specialises in spreading disinformation. German intelligence believes they have been trying to gain access to the private email accounts of federal and regional MPs and says Russia’s military intelligence service GRU is behind the attacks.
The European Union and United States have repeatedly accused Moscow of attempting to meddle in democratic elections, something the Kremlin has disputed.