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Bafin headquarters in Frankfurt: Dozens of transactions in Wirecard shares - by employees who are supposed to monitor insider trading
Photo: Boris Roessler / DPA
When it came to the supervision of the Wirecard accounting scandal, Bafin boss Felix Hufeld interpreted the authority of his authority very narrowly: It is only responsible for Wirecard Bank AG, the entire group is just a technology company - so there was virtually no supervision of money laundering instead of.
Several Bafin employees, on the other hand, allowed generous leeway to act for their own pockets.
In the months before the Wirecard bankruptcy in June, employees of the state financial supervisory authority increasingly traded privately with papers from the payment provider.
In the first half of 2020, 2.4 percent of all reported private financial transactions were transactions with Wirecard shares or share derivatives.
According to the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung", Bafin employees did not trade as much with any share as with Wirecard papers in the 18 months up to the end of June 2020.
Public employees from the Bafin department WA2, which is responsible for market surveillance, are said to have carried out a particularly large number of private share transactions.
The newspaper speaks of 28 cases in 2019 and 41 cases in 2020. The department is responsible for compliance with the rules on insider trading.
Stricter rules apply at the ECB
The Federal Ministry of Finance, which is superordinate to the Bafin, saw no problem in private business so far.
It is guaranteed that no inside information can be used for stock transactions.
The internal control system of the Bafin is "strict and appropriate".
But now the federal government suddenly wants to act.
After the Wirecard scandal was exposed - and it is also coming under increasing pressure, the rules for private stock transactions by Bafin employees are to be scrutinized.
The current regulations would be "currently checked, especially with regard to possible restrictions on the trading of financial instruments of supervised entrepreneurs by Bafin employees", it said in a written answer of the finance ministry to an inquiry of the Green Bundestag member Danyal Bayaz.
Bayaz said Bafin President Hufeld was open to changing the rules at the special meeting of the finance committee.
"The trading of financial instruments of supervised companies by employees must be largely excluded."
The stricter rules of the European Central Bank (ECB) or the Dutch financial regulator showed how it could be done better.
Perhaps at some point Hufeld will also criticize the Wirecard Group's classification as a technology company.
Other European supervisory authorities had at least decided differently for comparable companies.
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apr / Reuters
