Wirecard trial: Serious allegations against EY

“It would have been pos­sible to re­act dif­fer­ently at that point, and then it would have been un­covered a year and a half earlier.”

In the pro­ceed­ings against Markus Braun and other ex-​Wirecard man­agers, state wit­ness Oliver Bel­len­haus de­scribed in de­tail the de­cep­tions car­ried out by him and the other de­fend­ants. Spe­cific­ally, this con­cerned the year 2018, in which a spe­cial in­vest­ig­a­tion of the former Dax company’s Asian busi­ness took place fol­low­ing al­leg­a­tions by whis­tleblowers. It was found that sev­eral con­tracts with part­ner com­pan­ies were simply forged.

Bel­len­haus, the company’s gov­ernor in Dubai, had been re­spons­ible for the task: “I was the fixer.” Thus, Bel­len­haus had suc­ceeded in falsi­fy­ing new con­tracts and thus fak­ing ten mil­lion euros in rev­en­ues. Sub­sequently, only cor­rec­tions of 3.6 mil­lion euros had to be made to the results.

EY’s aud­it­ors had been aware of this. The re­ac­tion of presid­ing judge Markus Födisch was ac­cord­ingly clear: “The aud­it­ors knew that there were fals­i­fied soft­ware con­tracts at Wir­e­card? What was the con­sequence?”. And later: “One could have re­acted dif­fer­ently at that point, then it would have been un­covered a year and a half earlier.”

We see these state­ments in the crim­inal trial as con­firm­ing our claims for dam­ages against EY. Based on the state of the in­vest­ig­a­tion to date, we as­sume that a prop­erly func­tion­ing aud­itor should have dis­covered the fraud and thus the dam­age to in­vestors years ago. In ad­di­tion, EY faces ac­cus­a­tions of hav­ing act­ively helped to shape the busi­ness model, or at least of hav­ing covered it with full knowledge.

If you have not already done so, you should de­cide to file a law­suit now, be­fore the stat­ute of lim­it­a­tions ex­pires, and thus be­come a party to the test case. If you do so, we will be happy to as­sist you.

All in­form­a­tion on the Wir­e­card scan­dal and on the op­tions for ac­tion for ag­grieved in­vestors can be found here.