WIRECARD: NEW STATUS REPORT FROM THE INSOLVENCY ADMINISTRATOR

The in­solv­ency ad­min­is­trator for the as­sets of Wir­e­card AG, at­tor­ney Dr. Mi­chael Jaffé, re­cently pub­lished a new status report.

Ac­cord­ing to the as­sess­ment of Jaffé and his team, the so-​called TPA busi­ness, the third-​party busi­ness that is so im­port­ant for Wir­e­card, never ex­is­ted. After eval­u­at­ing the bank’s ac­count state­ments in Singa­pore, “it is now fi­nally cer­tain what was already evid­ent from nu­mer­ous in­dic­a­tions,” judged the in­solv­ency ad­min­is­trator, ac­cord­ing to the Handelsblatt.

Ac­cord­ing to Jaffé, this is “dir­ect proof” that Wirecard’s “in­dir­ectly ac­coun­ted as­sets in the bil­lions were simply fictitious”.

The in­solv­ency ad­min­is­trator thus con­tra­dicts me­dia re­ports that ad­op­ted the line of de­fense of ex-​Wirecard CEO Markus Braun; ac­cord­ing to this, Braun’s de­fense had ar­gued that the TPA busi­ness had ac­tu­ally ex­is­ted, but that the earn­ings had been stolen from the on­go­ing busi­ness. Braun and his de­fense law­yers hold the fu­git­ive former board mem­ber Jan Mar­s­alek re­spons­ible for this.

Only re­cently, vari­ous me­dia had taken up Markus Braun’s line of de­fense and pub­lished re­search ac­cord­ing to which the money from the com­pany could have flowed into ac­counts in the Carib­bean. The in­solv­ency ad­min­is­trator now ar­gues against this in his cur­rent report.

In ad­di­tion, Mr. Jaffé con­cludes that Wir­e­card AG was in­solv­ent much earlier than June 2020, ac­cord­ing to the re­port, which states that the op­er­at­ing loss from the be­gin­ning of 2015 to 2020 amoun­ted to around 1.1 bil­lion euros.

CLAIM AGAINST EY

Con­trary to their own state­ments that their “top pri­or­ity” was to help cla­rify the Wir­e­card scan­dal, EY’s aud­it­ors “re­fused to co­oper­ate in any way in cla­ri­fy­ing the events,” ac­cord­ing to the status re­port. Ac­cord­ingly, the in­solv­ency ad­min­is­trator has filed an ac­tion for in­form­a­tion against EY in or­der to gain in­sight into EY’s audit documents.

Fur­ther­more, Mr. Jaffé is also ask­ing the ad­min­is­trat­ive court for ac­cess to the files of the Ger­man Fed­eral Min­istry of Justice, the aud­itor reg­u­lator Apas and the Ger­man Fin­an­cial Re­port­ing En­force­ment Panel (FREP).

Would you like to claim your lost in­vest­ment in Wir­e­card AG as dam­ages? Then join the com­munity of plaintiffs against the aud­it­ors EY here.