The auditing company EY filed a complaint against unknown persons for passing on a critical report classified as secret about the work of EY in the Wirecard case. According to the group, it is not about the often discussed question of whether the report should appear at all, but about the dissemination of the secret report.
The background of the paper and the advertisement is the role of the EY auditors in the Wirecard scandal. The auditing company had analyzed the Aschheim Group’s balance sheets for years and found them to be correct. For this reason, the Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry (PUA) of the Bundestag into the Wirecard case commissioned a special report to investigate precisely this role. The result is the so-called Wambach Report, named after its author Martin Wambach, who developed the report together with his team.
The 168-page paper, in which EY does not get off particularly well, was classified as secret by the secret protection agency of the German Bundestag in April. This means that the report is usually not available to the public. The reason for this classification was EY’s concerns, as the report contained, among other things, trade secrets. The auditors suggested that only a summary be published, which should not affect business secrets or the personal rights of EY employees.
However, the PUA did not accept this offer and preferred to publish the report in full. Also because the public could get a complete picture of the scandal, as the CSU politician Hans Michelbach said. “It is in the public interest that the confidentiality of the investigator’s reports be lifted,” said Michelbach. In the weeks that followed, the case reached the Federal Court of Justice, where the judge responsible initially rejected the request of the Parliamentary Compromise Committee for publication. The PUA appealed against this.
That Handelsblatt then published the Wambach Report in full in mid-November, citing the public interest, but with some blackouts. For example, the names of EY employees are illegible in order to protect their personal rights, as the newspaper writes.
The EY report now drawn up by the law firm Freshfields is directed against unknown persons and concerns the disclosure of the report by someone who had access to it. “From the point of view of EY, the passing on of the report represents a circumvention of this procedure provided for by the rule of law, violates the supreme judicial decision-making authority and creates facts on its own,” said an EY spokesman. By the procedure provided for by the rule of law, EY means the decision of the BGH. The criminal complaint is explicitly not aimed at the question of whether a publication would be lawful at all. A decision by the Federal Court of Justice is currently still pending.