“Project Everest”: EY stops split-​up plans

EY has sur­pris­ingly stopped the planned split of its audit and con­sult­ing business.

As re­por­ted by “Han­dels­blatt”, EY has sur­pris­ingly stopped the planned split of its audit and con­sult­ing busi­ness. The group made the an­nounce­ment in mid-​April. Ac­tu­ally, the 13,000 EY part­ners should have voted on the split-​up concept planne as “Pro­ject Everest” this month. How­ever, as the “Han­dels­blatt” ex­plains, res­ist­ance to the pro­ject had arisen es­pe­cially in the Amer­ican branch of the company.

Of­fi­cials say that “more time is needed to make the ne­ces­sary in­vest­ments in the parts to be spun off”. How­ever, the “Han­dels­blatt” alsp re­ports “great dis­ap­point­ment and even lack of un­der­stand­ing” in Ger­man so­ci­ety about the hal­ted split. About 2000 em­ploy­ees had been work­ing on the pro­ject, and more than 100 mil­lion ol­lars had already been invested.

Only at the be­gin­ning of April, the aud­itor watch­dog APAS ha severly pun­ished EY due to the mis­con­duct in the Wir­e­card scan­dal. For ex­ample, the reg­u­lator had found massive breaches of duty by EY’s aud­it­ors in con­nec­tion with the de­mise of the former DAX com­pany and is­sued the com­pany with a two-​year par­tial non-​compete clause.

EY is fa­cing an enorm­ous wave of claims for amages due to its role in the Wir­e­card scan­dal. It is cur­rently pos­sible to re­gister in the cap­ital in­vestor model pro­ceed­ings that have now been opened. All in­form­a­tion on this and on the back­ground to the Wir­e­card scan­dal can be found here.

(17. April 2023)