EY’s auditors question Wirecard’s entire business with third-party partners in Asia – and not only fail to close the annual accounts for 2019, but even those for 2018.
–
Wirecard AG, which is plagued by bankruptcy and criminal proceedings, has to accept new setbacks. In early Monday morning, the management board in Aschheim received a six-page letter from the auditors from EY (formerly Ernst & Young), who have been auditing the company’s balance sheets for several years. The result is devastating for the board and the supervisory board of the badly hit Dax group.
In the letter that Süddeutscher Zeitung, NDR and WDR are available, the auditors not only issue a so-called refusal note for the 2019 annual financial statements, according to which the balance sheet presented by the group is incomplete and void. At the same time, the auditors question the entire third-party business in Asia, which allegedly made up a large part of the sales and profits of Aschheimer AG. In addition, the auditors massively criticize the information policy of the former stock exchange favorite. Documents such as bank statements or account opening receipts, despite several requests, were not presented, and promised contacts were not conveyed. In the meantime, the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) and the Munich public prosecutor have also been informed of the latest findings from auditors. Wirecard initially did not comment on request.
Only last week Wirecard had felt compelled to make an ad hoc averaging. The company said it believed there were no accounts with accounts in Asia totaling EUR 1.9 billion. But now it gets worse: Apparently not only the numbers for 2019 were wrong, but already for the 2018 balance sheet.
At the end of last year, the group changed its trustee for parts of the Asian business. The former trustee, who managed Wirecard’s escrow accounts until the end of 2019, allegedly once confirmed funds of around 980 million euros with the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation in Singapore. However, in view of growing doubts about Wirecard AG, the EY examiners recently asked again more precisely: At the beginning of last week, they asked the service provider again to confirm the balance as of December 31, 2018. The trustee replied: “Please note that this is not my letter and the letterhead of our company. Please note that we do not hold such credit, nor have we confirmed it. ” In addition, the last time they worked in trust for a Wirecard company in March 2017. This means that not only are credit missing and documents possibly falsified for the 2019 financial year, but already for 2018. “This gives rise to reasonable suspicion,” it says in the letter from the EY auditors to the remaining Wirecard board, “that the trustee’s balance confirmations and the information on the account balances as of December 31, 2018 that we received were also incorrect “. This in turn means that there is a suspicion that the balance sheet for 2018 could be wrong. Wirecard therefore seems to have been a house of cards for a long time.
The new findings once again put the former board member Jan Marsalek at the center of the Wirecard affair. Jan Marsalek, until a few days ago Chief Operating Officer in Aschheim, has significantly built up the Asian business with third parties and trustees. Marsalek has now been released. He actually wanted to face the Munich public prosecutor this week. Now he is apparently on the run.
– .
