The German Association for the Protection of Securities (DSW) wants to push the auditing company EY to find a way to compensate Wirecard investors outside of the courts.

For this purpose, after about a year of preparation, DSW set up a non-profit foundation under Dutch law.

According to DSW, the Dutch compensation fund should not only target EY Germany.

but also EY Global, i.e. the international auditor network to which the German arm of EY responsible for examining Wirecard business figures belongs.

Mark Fehr

Editor in Business.

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With this instrument, DSW wants to bundle claims from 30,000 registered private investors and a total loss of 1.5 billion euros.

Other investors can join free of charge if they have not already sued EY for damages for their Wirecard losses by other means.

This also applies to investors who are not based in Germany.

DSW CEO Marc Tüngler described the foundation on Wednesday as a "perhaps a little smarter solution" compared to other alternatives.

What is meant is the investor test case against EY, the opening of which is currently being examined by the Bavarian Supreme Regional Court.

In addition, as of March, there are 900 individual lawsuits against EY by Wirecard victims at the Munich Regional Court.

Third way to the goal opened

There are now three ways for investors to obtain possible compensation from the auditors: the Dutch foundation with the compensation fund, the investor test case and the individual lawsuit.

What they have in common is that shareholders and creditors of the former Dax member Wirecard, which went bankrupt in June 2020, are demanding damages from the auditing company responsible for the company, EY.

EY had checked and certified Wirecard's annual balance sheets since 2009, i.e. confirmed the compliance of the business figures with the legal regulations.

EY only refused the attestation for the 2019 annual financial statements, and Wirecard had to admit that 1.9 billion euros were missing.

The bankruptcy filing followed shortly thereafter.

According to Andreas Lang, partner at the law firm Nieding+Barth, Wirecard should have reported a loss instead of a profit in 2017.

The auditing firm KPMG, who was later called in as a special auditor, then recognized straight away and without forensic methods that there was no confirmation of the existence of allegedly high bank balances.

EY failed to obtain these confirmations from independent third parties.

For the auditor Ulrich Harnacke, who is part of the DSW presidium, it was therefore clear very early on that EY had violated basic audit routine at this point.