The European Commission announced on Friday 26 June that it has asked the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) to carry out a preliminary investigation into the adequacy of supervision by the German financial watchdog, BaFin, in connection with the accounting scandal involving the German payment service provider Wirecard (see EUROPE 12512/15).
The company, which filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, admitted that a sum of €1.9 billion, which was entered on the company’s balance sheet in 2019 but which the auditors had been unable to certify, “very probably does not exist”, thus reinforcing the suspicions of fraud that led to the resignation of its boss, Markus Braun, last week.
Alerts about the company’s fraudulent activities have been issued for years, including a Financial Times investigation into this topic published in 2019.
“We have today asked ESMA to carry out a preliminary investigation into what went wrong at Wirecard. We have also asked them to set out the possible course of action. Listed companies must be supervised effectively by national competent authorities”, said Commission Executive Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis on Twitter.
For its part, ESMA confirmed to us that it had received the Commission's request to “carry out a fact finding analysis of events leading to the collapse of Wirecard AG and of the supervisory responses to these events”. The Commission’s requests relate more specifically to compliance with the financial reporting requirements of the Transparency Directive, we have been told.
According to AFP, in a letter to ESMA sent on Thursday, the Commission asked for the analysis to be concluded by 15 July at the latest. Depending on the results of the preliminary investigation, the Commission may ask ESMA to launch a formal investigation to determine whether there has been a possible violation of EU law. (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)