The concern is formulated as a polite request, in an official letter to the President of the Bundestag. Wolfgang Schäuble should, so write the parliamentary managing directors of the Left, FDP and Greens, lodge a complaint with the BGH: against the decision made in Karlsruhe in August that an investigation report that is particularly important for Wirecard victims and believers must remain under lock and key. The undersigned and their parliamentary groups are convinced that the final report of the Wirecard committee of inquiry lacks meaningfulness, “it lacks the reports of the investigators in a version that is comprehensible to the public, that is, an unenclosed version”. Because the committee no longer exists, it is now up to the Bureau of Parliament.
The MPs are concerned with the special audit documented in several reports on the work of Wirecard’s long-standing auditor EY. The Cologne auditor Martin Wambach had worked his way through thousands of files and files on behalf of the investigation committee and searched for possible errors in the final audits at Wirecard since 2016. The reports are largely classified as secret and so far only accessible in blackened form. Wambach’s findings are tricky for EY: According to him, there were numerous starting points for the fact that Wirecard’s auditors had “not fully implemented” professional regulations. At EY, so the tenor, there may have been slippage, and that is one of the reasons why the alleged fraud at Wirecard was not exposed earlier. EY has always rejected this and stressed that it had been betrayed itself.
Do committees of inquiry have legal successors?
The committee members failed at the beginning of August at the Federal Court of Justice with the request to make the reports public in an unredacted form. The corresponding application was received just in time – one day before the committee of inquiry disbanded on June 25th. However, the necessary documents arrived at the BGH much later, according to the decision of the BGH investigating judge Andreas Sturm. On August 5th, when the court decided, the committee no longer existed. And because the committee as a body has no legal successor, the motion is also not admissible.
But is that also true? The three opposition factions now want this clarified: whether the Bundestag itself can be the legal successor to a committee of inquiry. The MPs had assumed this, but the BGH had denied it with reference to the Basic Law and the case law of the Federal Constitutional Court.
Now it is about “unresolved legal issues of fundamental importance”, write the signatories of the letter to Schäuble, Britta Haßelmann (Greens), Jan Korte (left) and the ex-chairman of his parliamentary group in the Wirecard Committee Florian Toncar (FDP). “A decision by the Senate of the Federal Court of Justice is necessary in order to obtain legal certainty, also for future committees of inquiry,” it continues. This is also emphasized by the Green finance expert Lisa Paus. In your view, it was also wrong from the start to classify the EY documents as secret. The sole purpose of this was to “complicate and delay the educational work of the parliamentary committee of inquiry.”