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German lawmakers have censured Finance Minister Olaf Scholz for Electronic card scandal, saying he was politically responsible for the failure of financial supervision in Germany that the saga exposed.
The report of opposition lawmakers, which follows on parliamentary investigation of months, also said Chancellor Angela Merkel was “too naive” about the technology company’s pressure efforts, which collapsed into insolvency last June after admitting missing 1.9 billion euros in its accounts.
In addition to attacking the finance ministry, the report blamed the Wirecard EY auditor and the company’s supervisory board, saying they too had failed miserably in their oversight duty.
“The Wirecard scandal is much more than an accounting scandal,” the authors wrote. “It’s the biggest financial and stock market scandal [Germany’s] postwar history “.
They had been made possible, they said, thanks to a “collective failure of supervision,” a “German siege mentality toward non-Germans,” and “the longing for a digital champion who could enter the Chinese market.”
Scholz, who is the center-left Social Democrat candidate for chancellor in the September Bundestag election, declined to comment. In a statement, EY Germany said it had not received the report and therefore could not comment on the content.
The 675-page document, drafted by the opposition Free Democrats (FDP), Greens and the Left Left Die Linke, has been published as a dissenting opinion in the final report of the parliamentary inquiry, which is likely to be modeled by MPs. of the ruling parties: Angela Merkel’s center-right CDU / CSU and Scholz’s SPD.
While opposition MPs did not point the finger at Merkel, they did say she had been “too naive” in her dealings with one of Wirecard’s main lobbyists, a former defense minister. Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg. He had persuaded her to call the company in talks with Chinese officials during a 2019 trip to Beijing.
The report highlighted the special guilt of the Financial Intelligence Unit, Germany’s leading anti-money laundering and terrorist financing agency, and BaFin, the German financial dog. Both are overseen by the Ministry of Finance.
“For every public complaint against Wirecard, BaFin sought and found reasons to stand idly by,” the report said. He said the watchdog had “fully accepted the narrative” presented by Wirecard that the company was “the victim of an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy of short sellers and financial means”.
Deputies said BaFin’s reputation could only be restored through a “cultural revolution”, adding that “the scale of the shortcomings and shortcomings observed” had previously been “inconceivable”.
It should be noted that the report criticized the FIU and Rolf Bösinger, the secretary of state of the responsible finance ministry.
Deputies said the parliamentary investigation was not adequately reported on a highly detailed suspicious activity report that Commerzbank submitted to the FIU in February 2019. The report and an additional explanation from Commerzbank detailed many dubious Wirecard transactions. But the FIU only referred her to the criminal prosecutors after the company collapsed.
The investigation only learned of the extent of Commerzbank’s warning to the FIU after public broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk reported the classified documents. Deputies censured Bösinger for drafting key information from documents he presented to the committee.
Deputies said Scholz and his deputy Jörg Kukies, who oversees the financial markets in the finance ministry, had the ultimate responsibility for the “abuses of their subordinate authorities”.
Bösinger and Kukies declined to comment.
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