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German lawmakers condemned Olaf Scholz, Minister of Finance Line card scandal, Said he was politically responsible for the failure of German financial supervision that this incident exposed.
Opposition lawmakers’ report followed Months-long parliamentary investigation, Also said that German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s lobbying efforts for the technology company were “too naive”, and the company went bankrupt after admitting that its account lacked 1.9 billion euros in June last year.
In addition to lashing out at the Ministry of Finance, the report also accused Wirecard’s auditor Ernst & Young and the company’s board of supervisors, saying they also failed to perform their supervisory duties.
“The Wirecard scandal is not just an accounting scandal,” the author wrote. “This is the largest stock market and financial scandal in the U.S. [Germany’s] Post-war history. “
They said that this is due to the “collective failure of supervision”, “Germany’s siege mentality against non-Germans” and “the desire for a digital champion that can enter the Chinese market.”
Scholz, the center-left Social Democratic candidate for prime minister in the Bundestag election in September this year, declined to comment. Ernst & Young Germany stated in a statement that it has not received the report and therefore cannot comment on the content.
The 675-page document was drafted by the opposition Liberal Democratic Party (FDP), the Green Party, and the far-left Die Linke, and it has been published as an opposition to the final report of the parliamentary investigation, which is likely to be drafted by members of Congress. The ruling party-Angela Merkel’s center-right CDU/CDU and Schultz’s Social Democratic Party.
Although the opposition lawmakers did not accuse Merkel, they did say that she “behaved too naively” when dealing with one of Wirecard’s chief lobbyists and the former Secretary of Defense. Karl-Theodore Zu GutenbergDuring a trip to Beijing in 2019, he persuaded her to mention the company in conversations with Chinese officials.
The report specifically accused Germany’s financial intelligence agency, the main agency for combating money laundering and terrorist financing, and the German financial regulator BaFin. Both are supervised by the Ministry of Finance.
The report stated: “For every public accusation against Wirecard, BaFin is looking for and finding reasons to stand by.” It stated that the regulator “fully accepted Wirecard’s claim” that the company is an “Anglo-Saxon short seller.” And the victims of the financial media conspiracy”.
The lawmakers stated that BaFin’s reputation could only be restored through the “cultural revolution”, adding that “the scale of the defects and shortcomings observed” was previously “unimaginable”.
It is worth noting that the report criticized FIU and Rolf Bösinger, the Secretary of State of the Ministry of Finance who is in charge of it.
The parliamentarians stated that the parliamentary investigation did not correctly understand a highly detailed suspicious activity report submitted by Commerzbank to the Financial Intelligence Unit in February 2019. The report, and the supplementary explanation from Commerzbank, detailed many suspicious Wirecard transactions. But FIU only forwarded it to criminal prosecutors after the company went bankrupt.
After the public broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk reported the confidential documents, the investigation learned all the warnings issued by Commerzbank to FIU. Members of Congress condemned Bösinger for editing key information in the documents he submitted to the committee.
The parliamentarians stated that Scholz and his deputy Jörg Kukies bear the ultimate responsibility for the “abuse of the subordinate authorities,” who is responsible for overseeing the financial markets of the Ministry of Finance.
Bösinger and Kukies declined to comment.
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