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Berlin (dpa) - At the financial supervisory authority Bafin there is a change in the top management after the Wirecard scandal.
As the Ministry of Finance announced on Friday, Bafin boss Felix Hufeld is stopping in the course of a reorganization of the financial supervision.
The financial regulator and their boss had come under pressure in the scandal.
The scandal surrounding Wirecard AG revealed that the German financial supervisory authority needed a reorganization in order to be able to fulfill its supervisory function more effectively, according to the ministry.
An investigation was commissioned by the Bafin, the results of which will be presented in the coming week.
The Ministry and the President of the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (Bafin) discussed the situation in a joint meeting today.
It was mutually agreed that, in addition to organizational changes, there should also be a new start in terms of personnel at the top of BaFin.
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Finance Minister Olaf Scholz (SPD) said: «I would like to expressly thank Felix Hufeld for his great commitment at the top of Bafin over the past eight years.
During this time, he made a decisive contribution to shaping financial services supervision in Germany and Europe.
We are combining the planned organizational reform of the Bafin with a new start in terms of personnel. "
Felix Hufeld explained: "I have been allowed to work at the top of BaFin for eight years, including six as President."
Bafin has developed significantly and gained relevance in many ways.
"Now I have to tackle other tasks that I wish my successor the best for mastering."
The lawyer Hufeld (59), who has led Bafin since March 2015, described the Wirecard affairs as a “shame” and spoke of the “most appalling situation” in which he had ever seen a company in the first German stock market league.
At the same time, the Bafin boss was self-critical about the role of supervision: "We were not effective enough to prevent something like this from happening."
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The now insolvent Wirecard AG had granted air bookings of 1.9 billion euros in June and had to.
The Munich public prosecutor's office is now assuming a “commercial gang fraud” - and has been since 2015. More than three billion euros could be lost.
The question is, how did this happen?
And when exactly did the financial regulators know about irregularities and have they done too little about them?
Since 2015, the British newspaper “Financial Times” had repeatedly reported on oddities and irregularities at Wirecard.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210129-99-226009 / 3