Wirecard: Questioning of Markus Braun continues – defeat for EY

In the crim­inal trial against three former man­agers of Wir­e­card AG, the ques­tion­ing of ex-​Wirecard-​CEO Markus Braun continued. 

The former CEO con­tin­ued to in­sist on his in­no­cence. The former pay­ment ser­vice provider’s third party ac­quir­ing busi­ness plays a cent­ral role here. Braun’s de­fense strategy is to show that this so-​called TPA busi­ness ac­tu­ally ex­is­ted. Ac­cord­ing to Braun, a group around co-​defendant Oliver Bel­len­haus was re­spons­ible for the TPA busi­ness and em­bezzled funds from it.

How­ever, the pub­lic prosecutor’s of­fice and also the in­solv­ency ad­min­is­trator of Wir­e­card AG, Dr. Mi­chael Jaffé, as­sume that the third party busi­ness never ex­is­ted. Markus Födisch, presid­ing judge in the crim­inal trial, also ex­pressed doubts about Braun’s ver­sion: “Let’s wait and see what the tak­ing of evid­ence re­veals – we both know what the files reveal.”

Be­fore that, how­ever, Markus Braun’s ques­tion­ing is ex­pec­ted to con­tinue for three more days of the trial about the biggest Ger­man eco­nomic scan­dal of the post-​war period.

Blow for auditor EY

Mean­while, Wir­e­card AG’s long-​standing aud­itor, Ernst & Young (EY), suffered a set­back at the Stut­tgart Higher Re­gional Court.

The Stut­tgart judges re­jec­ted an ap­plic­a­tion by EY to re­fuse to hand over audit doc­u­ments re­lat­ing to Wir­e­card to the in­solv­ency administrator.

In­stead, the de­cision, which was first re­por­ted by “Spiegel” magazine, was made as early as March 1st. EY had been re­spons­ible for the audit of Wir­e­card AG’s bal­ance sheet for years andd is fa­cing fierce ac­cus­a­tions. Nu­mer­ous ag­grieved in­vestors have already de­cided to sue the audit­ing firm for damages.

The de­cision of the Stut­tgart Higher Re­gional Court is likely to con­trib­ute fur­ther to cla­ri­fy­ing the facts of the case. We there­fore con­tinue to re­com­mend that ag­grieved in­vestors as­sert their claims against EY.

In this con­text, ag­grieved parties can file a law­suit for dam­ages or re­gister their claims in the Cap­ital In­vestor Model Pro­ceed­ings (KapMuG) which have been opened in the mean­time. In such pro­ceed­ings, the claims of ag­grieved in­vestors are bundled and legal dis­putes are re­solved in a single trial with a model plaintiff. The law firm Schirp & Part­ner rep­res­ents the largest group of plaintiffs in­volved in the model pro­ceed­ings and has ap­plied to rep­res­ent the model plaintiff in or­der to ad­vance the KapMuG pro­ceed­ings as quickly as pos­sible and in the in­terests of the in­jured parties.

We will be happy to re­gister you in the model pro­ceed­ings. Fur­ther in­form­a­tion on the Wir­e­card scan­dal and our ac­tion against EY can be found here.