Mr. Ahlers, Mr. Jégourel, EY embarrassed itself to the bone in the Wirecard scandal.

Do you accept the role of the main culprit?

Bettina Weiguny

Freelance writer in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

  • Follow I follow

    Georg Meck

    Responsible editor for economics and "Money & More" of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

    • Follow I follow

      Ahlers: No.

      Wirecard is certainly not a test that we are proud of.

      And we deeply regret that we did not detect the fraud sooner.

      But the Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry also comes to the conclusion that the entire supervisory side did not work properly.

      We are part of the oversight system.

      We face this responsibility.

      You have audited the balance sheet of the fraudulent company year after year.

      Who else failed?

      Jégourel: It is not our place to point a finger at others.

      As part of corporate governance, the company's supervisory board has the task of controlling both business and the executive board.

      Apparently, this control function has not worked at Wirecard for a long time.

      If so, shouldn't you have noticed as an auditor?

      Ahlers: We were critical of that, and Wirecard made changes as a result.

      But Wirecard has grown so quickly and made it into the Dax, so it is not unusual for such companies to lag behind with their committees and processes.

      At first, that didn't seem unusual at Wirecard, and nobody else noticed it either.

      The fraud is so huge that the suspicion quickly arose that the criminals must have allies or at least confidante with the auditors.

      Jégourel: That assumption is completely absurd!

      There is not the slightest sign of that; we had it investigated with external help.

      There was nothing, nothing at all.

      Anything else would have shaken my belief in this company.

      The auditors acted with good intent and to the best of their knowledge and belief.

      Then what went wrong?

      Jégourel: In retrospect, it is becoming easier and easier. I'm not sure yet whether we could have uncovered the fraud earlier.

      Precisely because it was such a gigantic fraud along a complex value chain.

      With offenders all the way to the top, it looks like.

      It's like a needle in a haystack.

      Today we know roughly where the needle was.

      It's easy to say: You should have looked there.

      In the end, the matter wasn't that complex: The Wirecard villains invented two billion euros in accounts in Asia that didn't exist, at least a third of the balance sheet - and they fobbed off with fake balance confirmations.

      Why didn't you just walk over to the bank bosses and see if they were managing so much money from Germany?

      Ahlers: If it were that easy!

      We have just not let ourselves be fobbed off, we even visited the branches of the local banks in the Philippines.

      Only very late and under pressure, after special auditors from KPMG were called in.

      Ahlers: In the end, it was we who tracked down the fake bank accounts.

      I couldn't have imagined this dimension of criminal energy.

      We visited alleged Wirecard banks in the Philippines, which we now assume that the whole meetings were staged like a drama.

      Where bank employees were bribed, where lay people were probably hired as actors, where the whole branch was possibly a fake, the rooms were specially rented and set up as a bank for us visitors.

      Unfortunately, you only see through all of this in retrospect.