German tobacco tax blunder: Law professor says quiet fix is not permissible
Passau professor Kai von Lewinski is calling for a new law instead of a correction by Germany's Finance Ministry and sees possible routes to the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe.
Symbolic image · Photo: Perituss / Wikimedia Commons, CC0 (cropped and resized)
In the dispute over Germany's flawed tobacco tax law, a legal scholar is challenging the approach taken by the Federal Finance Ministry. Passau law professor Kai von Lewinski considers it impermissible to fix the error through a simple correction without the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament. What is needed, he says, is a new law passed by parliament. “The clean way is a repair law – after all, you empty a dirty ashtray,” he told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper, German news agency dts reported.
A correction requires that the error be obvious and that it also be clear what the correct wording should be, von Lewinski wrote on LinkedIn. He doubts that this is the case. He also asks why the law contains transitional rules for 2026 if it as a whole is not due to take effect until Jan. 1, 2027. “The current tobacco tax amendment law was probably not politically intended in this form,” the jurist said.
In his view, parliamentary groups or individual lawmakers could bring a dispute between constitutional bodies before the Federal Constitutional Court, while the tobacco industry or smokers could file constitutional complaints.