Manaf Hassan criticized the closeness of Federal Constitutional Court President Stephan Harbarth to the political leadership. A photo from the weekend in Bremen shows Harbarth at the state ceremony for the Day of German Unity directly next to leading politicians, he wrote. The court president must stand for the separation of powers, but had previously served as a CDU member of the Bundestag, a member of the CDU federal executive, and as deputy chairman of the CDU/CSU faction in the Bundestag. Harbarth had switched from the faction leadership to the Federal Constitutional Court in November 2018 and was elected vice president the day after his election as a judge. About a year and a half later, he became president. Hassan described it as unusual that Harbarth reached the head of the court without prior judicial activity in Karlsruhe. Before that, Harbarth had worked as a partner in a law firm that split from Shearman & Sterling in 2008, becoming SZA Schilling, Zutt & Anschütz. Until 2004, Hanno Berger also worked there in Frankfurt on tax law. Berger is considered a central developer of the Cum-Ex transactions, in which banks and investors received refunds for capital gains tax that they had never paid. Experts estimate the damage, according to Hassan, at a double-digit billion amount. Berger later advised, among others, the Hamburg Warburg Bank and has since been legally convicted. Harbarth worked during those years in the Mannheim office of the law firm; what he knew about Berger's activities remains unclear, Hassan wrote. Additionally, Hassan referred to decisions and proceedings at the Federal Constitutional Court: The First Senate under Harbarth's chairmanship had examined and largely approved central Corona measures in 2021. In the Second Senate, there has been a complaint regarding the election review from BSW for almost two years, which wants to achieve a recount of the federal election and entry into the Bundestag. If BSW were to enter Parliament retroactively, the black-red coalition would lose its own majority, according to Hassan. He asked how Harbarth could be at the head of the court while also publicly standing next to the government, whose actions the court should control. #Bremen #Bundesverfassungsgericht #Politik (translated)
