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Photo: Peter Kneffel / dpa
The head of the auditor supervision Apas, Ralf Bose, has been released after doing business with Wirecard shares.
The Federal Office for Economics and Export Control (Bafa) announced that he was informed about this on December 11th.
This is done "in order to ensure the integrity of the Apas until the facts are finally clarified."
Apas oversees auditors in Germany.
Strange losing business
At the meeting of the Wirecard committee of inquiry in the Bundestag, Apas boss Ralf Bose testified that he had privately traded shares in the scandalous company, while the federal authorities took a closer look at the work of the Wirecard auditor at the time, Ernst & Young (EY).
Federal Minister of Economics Peter Altmaier (CDU) said on Friday that this process had alienated him.
Bose bought shares in Wirecard on April 28 and sold them again on May 20, as participants in the committee meeting had said after Bose's questioning.
So he had acquired it on the very day the payment processor received a special report stating a damning verdict from KPMG's auditors.
Apas is criticized in the Wirecard case because it did not initiate formal proceedings against EY until the summer of 2020, although the allegations of fraud had hardened months earlier.
The EY auditors had approved the balance sheets of the former Dax group Wirecard for years, although the group is said to have reported fictitious profits since 2015.
Report against EY manager
Another statement before the committee of inquiry apparently has legal consequences.
The Bundestag member Cansel Kiziltepe (SPD) has filed a criminal complaint against the EY manager Christian Orth with the Berlin public prosecutor's office on suspicion of undecided false testimony.
Orth is head of internal quality assurance at EY and was invited as a witness in this capacity.
The report is available to SPIEGEL.
"I assume that he gave false testimony to the Wirecard investigative committee," said Kiziltepe.
The background to the dispute is a phone call Orth made on the evening of November 25th with a high-ranking Apas official - at a time when the agency was already bringing criminal charges against EY auditors.
However, there are different representations of the content of this telephone call.
Contradictory statements
According to the Apas official, Orth explicitly inquired about the content of the (previously unknown) advertisement.
The officer stated that he recorded the unusual occurrence in a protocol following the conversation.
Orth had testified before the investigative committee that he did not know about the allegations against EY employees and only asked for a contact person for the legal department on the phone.
“While we are working on the complete investigation of the Wirecard scandal for weeks, Dr.
Orth doesn't think it necessary to make truthful statements, ”Kiziltepe said.
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rai / dpa / Reuters
