Wirecard headquarters in Aschheim near Munich
Photo: MICHAEL DALDER / REUTERS
So that was the big day on which the German public saw Markus Braun again for the first time in months.
The ex-boss of the scandal group Wirecard had to testify on Thursday in Berlin in front of the parliamentary committee of inquiry about his role in the former DAX company.
Braun did not say much about it.
The real star of the day was therefore Tina Kleingarn, who sat on the Group's supervisory board between summer 2016 and autumn 2017 and described the situation there at the time in her farewell letter with astonishing clarity.
In her letter, which she wrote to the then chairman of the supervisory board, Wolf Matthias, she resigned her mandate, with the remarks that Braun ran Wirecard in the manner of a manor (hit!), CFO Alexander von Knoop was a total failure (hit!) And the rest of the board a collection of washcloths that Braun can order them around (hit!).
You can read more details here.
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From today's perspective, Kleingarn's findings at that time can only be subscribed to.
So she is the belated heroine of the Wirecards scandal - and at the same time a tragic figure, because her fire letter only reaches the public now, when everything is too late.
At the time, Kleingarn obviously did not have the courage or the opportunity to make the grievances transparent.
Perhaps she had humanly understandable reasons for this.
For example, that it might be detrimental to your career to appear in public as a polluter and to have damaged the reputation of a supposedly modern company, of which there are not many in Germany.
Or more profane, that there were no legal reasons to involve the public prosecutor.
The inaction of financial supervision and the stock market
Informing the financial supervisory authority Bafin presumably would not have done much in view of the amateur nature of the Bonn authority.
Its President Felix Hufeld has so far survived the scandal surprisingly unscathed.
Possibly because Finance Minister Olaf Scholz is still protecting him in order to sacrifice Hufeld as a scapegoat when the opportunity arises and to divert attention from his own failure.
Or simply because in the German economy even the biggest mistakes are rarely punished.
Either way, it is a pity that Kleingarn's fire letter is an isolated case - in any case, it is very unlikely that more such letters will circulate in Germany's management.
Now not every corporation is as rotten as Wirecard.
But far too seldom grievances are openly addressed or reported to the outside world, and a well-paid mandate is almost never given up because of annoyance.
Anyone who breaks out of the crowd has gambled away in the harmony-obsessed public - and especially in the Deutschland AG.
As always, it consists of the same (men's) networks.
From people like Bayer Supervisory Board Chairman Werner Wenning, who steered the company into the Monsanto disaster.
Or his colleague on the Bayer supervisory body Paul Achleitner, who as chairman of the supervisory board has presided over the decline of Deutsche Bank for almost ten years and is watching as the investment bankers take over the helm again.
A slightly different, but also good example: Ex-Wirecard supervisory board chairman Wulf Matthias.
The ex-private banker, born in 1944, breathes a lot of fresh air in Königstein, the boring luxury ghetto of the Frankfurt financial scene. According to insiders, he doesn't understand much about digitization and Wirecard's business model, but he willingly let himself be harnessed to mimic the chief controller.
With this division of tasks, everyone involved could live wonderfully until the company collapsed.
It's just stupid that the German equity culture may have suffered irreparable damage.
One can get scared that there is no whistleblower culture in Germany like elsewhere.
In the end, the Wirecard scandal was only exposed because Anglo-Saxon insiders have turned to the Anglo-Saxon business newspaper "Financial Times".
Far too seldom grievances are openly addressed or reported to the outside world, and well-paid mandates are almost never given up out of annoyance.
Perhaps, it is really only a tiny hope, if Deutsche Börse manages to reform its admission criteria for the Dax selection index in such a way that something changes structurally in the capital market culture.
The stock exchange has also watched for years how a company, Wirecard, rose to the Dax, whose supervisory board and management board were so small and so little diverse that it needed blinkers not to recognize it.
The stock exchange wants to present its reform catalog on Monday.
And maybe it's about more than just expanding the Dax from 30 to 40 members.
Perhaps she can then also explain how one should actually evaluate the fact that Deutsche Börse has just bought the company ISS for 1.5 billion euros.
ISS advises large, powerful shareholders on their voting behavior at general meetings.
This means that the stock exchange, the real center of equity trading in Germany, is gaining a power that is explosive.
Your subsidiary ISS will (co) decide who will join the supervisory boards of large corporations and who will have to leave.
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By the way: Theodor Weimer, CEO of Deutsche Börse, is a member of the Supervisory Board of Deutsche Bank and Achleitner's designated successor as chairman.
Let's see whether ISS will benevolently accompany its further ascent there.
It would be more important, however, that ISS can in future also warm up to people like Tina Kleingarn - and encourage such lateral thinkers.
And besides being able to rehabilitate this currently toxic term.
One can still dream.
Icon: The mirror