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The senior executive of Deutsche Bank in charge of the Wirecard audit and a former Ernst & Young partner have taken legal action to try to prevent the German parliamentary committee from naming him in the scandal report.
Andreas Loetscher was one of Ernst & Young’s two main audit partners on Wirecard from 2015 to 2017. On Monday, he asked the Berlin Administrative Court to ban the publication of the report. The report will be discussed in the Bundestag on Friday. Wirecard’s bankruptcy.
This move is part of a struggle between Wirecard’s former auditors and German legislators. Ernst & Young has disputed with the parliament over a separate severe report issued by a special investigator who concluded that the audit contained a series of major flaws.
People familiar with the matter told the Financial Times that the injunction application was filed in Loetscher’s personal capacity, and the move was not coordinated with his current or former employer. Deutsche Bank declined to comment, and Ernst & Young did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Wirecard went bankrupt after acknowledging that 1.9 billion euros of corporate cash may never exist. For more than ten years, it has been undergoing unqualified audits by Ernst & Young.
After working at Ernst & Young for more than 20 years, Loetscher joined Deutsche Bank in 2018 as the head of accounting. At the end of last year, he temporarily resigned from the position, but still served as an audit consultant.
He claimed that the job change was the result of “untenable suspicion” by the committee. At the time, Deutsche Bank stated that this happened “at the request of Andreas and with mutual consent.”
Loetscher’s work as the chief auditor is known to the public because he personally signed the Wirecard audit and his surname was mentioned in the public annual results of the disbanded group.
When he was invited as a witness in a parliamentary hearing on the Wirecard scandal in November last year, he refused to answer questions on the grounds that the regulator had investigated his actions.
Soon after, the Munich criminal prosecutor announced that they had launched a criminal investigation of certain Ernst & Young partners through Wirecard.
Lochelle denied any wrongdoing, arguing that mentioning his name in a public report would violate his personality rights. His lawyer suggested that he could be called by his initials instead of his full name.
Loetscher and his lawyers did not immediately respond to the investigation by the Financial Times.
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