After millions in damages due to fraud and theft at Hamburg-based Aurubis AG went undetected for a long time, CEO Roland Harings and two other board members have to leave the company early. The copper and recycling specialist announced this on Tuesday after a meeting of the supervisory board.
It is said that the three board members would “take into account” the “special challenges” faced by Aurubis. This refers in particular to the serious cases of fraud and theft at the Hamburg plant and incidents in the area of occupational safety: Last year, three employees died in a nitrogen leak at Aurubis. The cases of theft and fraud remained undetected for a long time. This raised doubts among the members of the control committee about the risk management of the company management.
A law firm was commissioned by the supervisory board to investigate what responsibility the board of directors bore for the crimes. Harings, whose contract actually ran until mid-2027, was still confident in December “that the investigations show that we have managed the company with all due care and responsibility.” The 60-year-old manager is now leaving Aurubis at the end of September. Production director Heiko Arnold is leaving on February 29th, and financial director Rainer Verhoeven is stepping down from his position on June 30th.
Only Inge Hofkens, the board member who was only appointed at the beginning of 2023 and is responsible for the emerging recycling business, will retain her board mandate. Aurubis was the victim of criminals in several cases. The bottom line is that when the company presented its annual results for 2022 and 2023 (September 30) in December, it spoke of a shortage of metals of 169 million euros. The balance sheet for the past financial year was also overshadowed by a fatal chemical accident. Nitrogen had escaped. Three men aged 24, 49 and 53 died as a result.
A large-scale fraud was particularly painful for the company from a financial perspective. This was noticed during regular checks of the metal inventory. There were significant deviations from the target inventory as well as deviations in special samples of certain recycling deliveries. Aurubis assumes that manipulated samples with high levels of valuable metals were delivered, but that the deliveries then contained significantly less valuable metals – which ultimately led to excessive invoices being paid.