Enlarge image
Ex-Wirecard boss Markus Braun
Photo:
Michael Dalder / REUTERS
The insolvency administrator of the scandalous group Wirecard, Michael Jaffé, massively increases the pressure on the former boss Markus Braun, on his colleagues on the board of directors and the supervisory board and the auditor EY.
This emerges from Jaffé's new status report, which SPIEGEL has received.
In the report, the insolvency administrator explains why, from his point of view, Braun's line of defense is nowhere near and on what basis he will demand money back from the ex-boss.
However, the report also makes it clear how little is likely to be left for creditors and shareholders at the end of the proceedings in a few years' time.
In the meantime, around 40,000 creditors and shareholders have registered claims that add up to 15.8 billion euros.
The Munich public prosecutor's office is investigating Braun, among other things, for commercial gang fraud, breach of trust, incorrect presentation and market manipulation.
He rejects the allegations.
Around 30 other former Wirecard executives and people from the group's environment are also being investigated.
At its core, it is about the question of whether business with external partner companies - so-called third party acquirers (TPA) - even existed.
1.9 billion euros from such transactions were supposedly parked in trust accounts, first in Singapore, then in the Philippines.
"One thing is certain: the TPA business never existed."
After a complex legal process, Jaffé has now received and evaluated all the bank statements from the Singapore bank, where the alleged trust accounts were kept.
He comes to the conclusion: "It is now finally clear what had already emerged from numerous circumstantial evidence: the alleged and reported TPA business with revenues in the billions did not exist at Wirecard."
Rather, it suggests that the Singapore accounts were run as expense accounts.
The supposed trust accounts were used to make purchases from the toy retailer Toys'R'Us and to pay for tank fillings.
660 payments alone were made to the Hedgehog dance bar in Singapore, which was operated by the alleged trustee Rajaratnam Shanmugaratnam.
The question of whether there was a TPA business is central to the claims made by executive boards, supervisory boards and auditors.
Jaffé has filed a lawsuit against the 2017 and 2018 financial statements due to the non-existence of the TPA business.
In these proceedings, Braun tries to rebut the accusation that the third-party business did not exist.
This is what he argues when trying to get out of custody.
He has been in the Augsburg JVA since the summer of 2020, and the Munich Higher Regional Court will shortly decide again whether he will be released against certain conditions.
Lawsuit against EY
Jaffé thinks Braun's portrayal is unfounded.
He wants to make use of the ex-boss as well as possibly his former board colleagues and supervisory board members.
He has already evaluated 1000 gigabytes of files to determine the basis for claims.
The highest amount that Braun and Co. may have to be liable for and that Jaffé could thus claim results from the fact that the management board and supervisory board approved payments of hundreds of millions of euros after Wirecard was already de facto insolvent.
Jaffé wants to support this with the annulment action.
Among other things, the committees granted Wirecards unsecured loans in the hundreds of millions to partner companies such as Goomo, Cleario, Bijlipay and Ocap, against which Jaffé has also filed a lawsuit.
Much money should not come from there, the insolvency administrator makes this clear in his report.
For this reason, he also adheres to the auditing company EY, which has not objected to Wirecard's balance sheets over the years.
Jaffé hired an auditor to check whether EY has breached its duties and to what extent this can be proven.
In order to prove EY errors, Jaffé filed a lawsuit at the Stuttgart Regional Court in order to gain access to EY's examination papers.
In the end, the Federal Court of Justice should decide on it.
Before the administrative court, Jaffé also demands access to the files of the Federal Ministry of Justice, the auditor supervision Apas and the German audit office for accounting.
Liquidation of the bank brings 120 million euros
While these disputes are likely to drag on for years, the insolvency administrator is making progress in winding up the group. Numerous parts of the group were sold, but most recently the liquidation of Wirecard Bank brought money for the bankruptcy estate. The credit portfolio of the group's own institute was reduced from 72 to 3.5 million euros. The financial regulator Bafin therefore released 120 million euros in deposits from Wirecard AG, which they had frozen after the bankruptcy of the parent company.
In total, Jaffé is now likely to have collected more than 700 million euros;
Those involved in the proceedings estimate that it could end up being around a billion euros.
This is offset by almost 16 billion euros in claims.
However, the courts have yet to clarify whether former Wirecard shareholders are even allowed to assert claims in the context of the insolvency proceedings.
Jaffé and the fund company Union Investment are currently arguing about this question in a pilot process.
All those involved assume that the Federal Court of Justice will only make a final decision in a few years' time.
If the judgment is in favor of the shareholders, all creditors should at best get reimbursed ten percent of their losses in the course of the insolvency proceedings.
