A year ago, the Dax group Wirecard filed for bankruptcy - a star company was allegedly the largest case of fraud in Germany since 1945. The first indictment is approaching.
And the judiciary is groaning under the wave of civil lawsuits.
Munich (dpa) - Almost a year after the insolvency of the scandalous company Wirecard, the first indictment is approaching.
The Munich public prosecutor's office obviously wants to concentrate on parts of the allegations in its investigation in order to come to a conclusion faster with ex-CEO Markus Braun and thus to the expected indictment.
The investigators do not give a specific date, but there has been speculation for weeks about an indictment in the second half of the year. To determine all aspects of the Wirecard crime complex would be "more a question of years than months," said a spokeswoman for the public prosecutor on Friday. In a state governed by the rule of law, no one should be kept in pre-trial detention for that long.
As always, the authority emphasized that the outcome would be open-ended. Thus, the setting is also a possible, albeit more theoretical, option. Braun and two other managers have been behind bars without interruption since summer 2020. In the case of detention, the public prosecutor's offices are obliged to conclude the investigation as quickly as possible. "Because of the special acceleration principle in detention matters, we prefer investigations against suspects who are in custody, as far as that is possible in isolation," said the spokeswoman. This suggests that there will be more charges over the next few years.
The now broken up Wirecard Group filed for bankruptcy on June 25th last year after dramatic weeks and months. Initially, the payment service provider had postponed the submission of the 2019 annual balance sheet several times and finally admitted on June 18 that 1.9 billion euros allegedly did not exist in trust accounts. The immediate trigger was that the auditing company EY refused to issue an audit certificate for the 2019 balance sheet.
The public prosecutor's office assumes “gang-like fraud”, in which lending banks and investors are said to have been defrauded by more than three billion euros.
Accordingly, the Wirecard boardroom should have started in 2015 at the latest to falsify the balance sheets with bogus sales in order to procure ever larger sums.
For this reason, EY has been the target of claims for damages for a year because the alleged fraudulent billions were not noticed earlier by the auditors.
In Germany there have already been white-collar crimes with greater damage to the companies involved, so the follow-up costs of the diesel affair for VW added up to over 30 billion euros.
But when it comes to fraud, Wirecard was in first place with three billion, ahead of the Baden-based company Flowtex, which had stolen two billion in the 1990s.
In the meantime, the regional courts of Munich and Stuttgart are arguing over jurisdiction for a wave of several hundred civil lawsuits.
The Stuttgart Regional Court has referred the 140 lawsuits against the auditor EY in connection with the Wirecard scandal to the Munich I Regional Court.
Around 400 Wirecard civil lawsuits are pending in Munich.
But the people of Munich do not want to be left with these proceedings alone.
For this reason, the regional court there has submitted “requests to determine the place of jurisdiction” to the Stuttgart Higher Regional Court in 21 cases, as the OLG announced.
Should the higher regional court decide in favor of Munich, the chambers involved in the Bavarian capital will probably refuse to take over in further proceedings.
Each case will be examined separately at the OLG, explained a spokeswoman.
“The decision is only binding for the respective procedure.” A single-digit number of lawsuits against EY has already been decided in Munich, in these cases the plaintiffs have lost.
There is not much to be gained in lawsuits against Wirecard AG itself.
When the group was broken up, insolvency administrator Michael Jaffé earned more than half a billion euros from the sale of subsidiaries; the creditors are entitled to this money.
But that only covers a small part of the alleged damage.
Creditors and tens of thousands of shareholders have registered claims of over twelve billion euros in the insolvency proceedings.
From a legal perspective, shareholders are not creditors, but owners.
In this respect, it will probably have to be clarified in a further court strand whether shareholders have any claims in insolvency proceedings.
In any case, the insolvency administrator has indicated this several times.
The claims for damages focus on EY, as the company had audited the allegedly falsified Wirecard balance sheets until 2018.
"We at EY Germany very much regret that the fraud at Wirecard was not discovered earlier and will act decisively so that a case like Wirecard does not happen again," said a spokesman for the auditing company.
EY fully supported the various ongoing investigations.
The fundamental question has not yet been clarified: How was a case of fraud of such magnitude even possible?
The Bundestag committee of inquiry has revealed that no one on the part of the authorities apparently felt that they were really responsible for the supervision of Wirecard.
Important information about money laundering and other suspicious factors were sent.
The opposition sees clear failure of the federal government, the Federal Ministry of Finance has rejected the allegations many times.
The parliamentary groups want to present their final assessments next Tuesday.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210618-99-49381 / 3
