The scandal and bankruptcy of the Dax group Wirecard were so great, the need for clarification so intense that even today every bit of paper, every paragraph of a document counts if it serves to establish the truth. What was Markus Braun and Jan Marsalek’s group doing? That is why we are publishing the – strangely enough – special report on the work of the EY auditors at Wirecard, classified as secret by the Bundestag, in the weekend edition.
A team led by Martin Wambach from the Institute of Auditors (IDW) presented the report to the Bundestag’s investigative committee on April 16, 2021. “With all due respect to the judiciary: there is overwhelming public interest in this report,” writes editor-in-chief Sebastian Matthes in the editorial. “If the public doesn’t find out what went wrong with Wirecard, nobody has a chance to learn from the case.” That’s why you can read all 168 pages online at www.handelsblatt.com/wambach. Matthes writes clearly: “After reading it, there is no longer any doubt: apart from those responsible at Wirecard, the EY auditors have the most to explain in this affair.”
A number of inconsistencies emerged during Wambach’s fact check. According to this, the auditing company EY found “significant deficits in accounting” as early as 2015, which were to be assessed as “fraud indicators” and “could have been recognized as such by an auditor”. “Fraud” means fraud, but the auditors – who have been entrusted with the balance sheet work at Wirecard since 2009 – overlooked numerous warning signals.
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In the Wambach Wirecard paper, there are sentences such as: “EY did not discern any discussion or plausibility check of these abnormalities”. In the EY working papers, neither “the necessary critical attitude” nor the “higher risk assessment of an auditor” resulting from the special situation was recognizable. Seat, grade unsatisfactory.
The secret dossier lists specific points. So EY …
- in the case of the takeover of the Indian Hermes Group, which must be classified as particularly critical, “essentially relies on verbal and written statements from persons who may be suspected”.
- in an important purchase agreement with the Al-Alam group from Dubai, apparently not noticed that the contract contained the name of another company instead of Al Alam six times.
Fairy tales from the Arabian Nights? EY rejects the allegation of wrongdoing. “In accordance with the IDW audit standards, a retrospective assessment does not allow any conclusions to be drawn about the misconduct of the auditor,” says a spokesman. In addition, the investigators were only able to look at individual aspects of EY’s audit activities during their work. The EY auditors had worked “to the best of their knowledge and belief”.
For real? Investors who lost 24 billion euros with the lazy magic share, as well as creditors who are still waiting for 12.4 billion euros, will read the Wambach report meticulously. Incidentally, on June 17, 2020, EY billed a total of 24,495 working hours at Wirecard for the “ongoing review of the 2019 consolidated financial statements”, to be remunerated at 4.5 million euros. Wirecard collapsed a day later.
Inflation is an ugly thing because it disadvantages good savers, wage and transfer recipients and favors debtors of all kinds, but also, for example, apartment landlords who have built an ongoing inflation adjustment into their contracts like fire alarms in the ceiling.
In his column, Handelsblatt chief economist Bert Rürup thinks about an “optimal” inflation rate – and thus about the European Central Bank (ECB). They have lifted their definition of monetary stability twice. When it was founded, the Bundesbank adopted the “below two percent” inflation target. In 2003 it was said “close to, but below two percent”, meanwhile two percent should be aimed for in the medium term. According to Rürup, one could not help but get the impression that the ECB is modifying its inflation target “primarily to signal to the highly indebted euro countries that they are continuing their very light interest rate policy”.
Well, there it is again, the chancellor-prime ministerial group for the fight against Corona. It should be ready next Thursday. In view of more than 50,000 new infections in one day, no politician wants to be accused of looking the other way. “We have to make our country winter-proof, as it were,” says Chancellor-designate Olaf Scholz and recommends 3G at work (access only for those who have been vaccinated, recovered or tested) and 2G at events.
The Robert Koch Institute, which is not exactly stabilizing in the pandemic, advises “urgently to cancel or avoid larger events if possible, but also to reduce all other unnecessary contacts”. No matter whether Scholz or Katrin Göring-Eckardt or other politicians, everyone says: Get vaccinated, wear a mask!
Award ceremony: From left: Handelsblatt editor-in-chief Sebastian Matthes, Orora Tech boss Thomas Grübler and in the background: McKinsey Germany boss Fabian Billing.
Don’t wait for the big innovations of tomorrow, for things like “Carbon Capture and Storage”, do something now against the climate disaster, preferably via digitization: This is the message the Swiss adventurer Bertrand Piccard from the Solar Impulse Foundation had yesterday evening when the German was awarded The Spark digital award. Orora Tech from Munich won the start-up competition organized by Handelsblatt with McKinsey, a start-up company that has established an early warning system against forest fires using satellite data and artificial intelligence.
The “Female Founder Award” went to Katharina Jünger for her pioneering work with the online medical practice Teleclinic, which was bought by the Doc Morris group in summer 2020. And Jünger says the sentence: “I would like to build many more strong companies.”
My culture tip for the weekend: “Mr. Wilder and I “by Jonathan Coe, a novel-based homage to cinema as it once was. And to the great director Billy Wilder, who at 70 wants to make another big film (“Fedora”), but in Hollywood they prefer “Suspense” for young people, so Steven Spielberg. Wilder’s fun idea “Jaws in Venice” would of course produce Hollywood, but not his story about the Greta Garbo moments of an aging diva. To do this, Wilder obtained “silly money” from Germany, the country from which he fled in 1933. Based on Wilder’s biographies and research, the author has assembled a lively novel about a fictional film assistant that extols the main character’s Jewish humor. It will not be forgotten how Wilder remembered his temporary residence in Vienna: “The Austrians have accomplished the feat of making Beethoven an Austrian and Hitler a German.”
And then there is – we are in Vienna – René Benko, Austrian real estate climber and German department store monopoly, who recently complained that there was “unfortunately a lot of incompetence, polemics and envy on the way”. Perhaps he was referring to the Vienna Public Prosecutor’s Office for Economic Affairs and Corruption: They are now accusing him, along with eight other entrepreneurs, of corrupting the former Green local politician Christoph Chorherr. The 60-year-old current baker, once “Mister Urban Planning”, is the main culprit.
The prosecutors accuse Benko of having donated 100,000 euros to the “S2Arch” association in order to support the Signa “Hauptbahnhof Business Center” project. Benko, Signa and Chorherr deny the allegations. “Celebrities tremble”, writes the “Kronen-Zeitung”, in which Benko is involved: “The indictment is tough.”
I wish you a peaceful weekend.
I warmly greet you
you
Hans-Jürgen Jakobs
Senior editor
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