"Get this newspaper ready!": Bank controller incited Wirecard boss

Friday 15th January 2021

"Get this newspaper done!"
Bank controller incited Wirecard boss

In the Wirecard scandal, a private e-mail from a member of the Deutsche Bank supervisory board is made public, which, according to the opposition's verdict, shows that the German financial elite are very close. The group tries to limit the damage.

From 2015 onwards, it was the British daily "Financial Times" (FT) that repeatedly disclosed alleged machinations by Wirecard that later turned out to be correct. The management team of the bankrupt group was always forced to take legal or verbal action against the reports. Actors in the capital market and in politics were only too happy to believe the appeasement of the former Wirecard boss Markus Braun, who portrays himself as a victim of crooks.

In retrospect, it is not surprising that Braun, who is in custody and is facing charges as a gang fraud, wrote in an email in February 2019 that he recently canceled his "long-term FT subscription" – with a smiley on it. "But I think that will quickly go in a different direction." * A wink smiley followed. The emojis and the wording coincide with the public perception of Braun that he lived in a kind of parallel world, ignored facts and believed his own stall magic.

The recipient replied: "I thought so. I read in the FT that you are really bad." Wink smiley. After the writer mentions a planned short trip to France, which is at the center of the mail exchange, the comment follows: "Incidentally, I bought 3x wirecard shares last week, finish this newspaper !!" The message ends with "lg", meaning "greetings".

The crucial passage was made public by Jens Zimmermann, who sits on the Wirecard investigative committee for the SPD, at the committee meeting on Friday night. The email exchange, which ntv.de has in its entirety, would be a minor issue in view of the biggest balance sheet fraud scandal in the post-war period in Germany, if it weren't for Braun's Duz friend Alexander Schütz, head of the C-Quadrat Investment Group he founded and a member of the supervisory board who has been critically eyed for years Deutsche Bank, which, like other German financial institutions, had granted Wirecard loans in the millions.

Deutsche Bank distances itself

The Social Democrat confronted the Group's CEO, Christian Sewing, who, like other top managers in the German banking scene, had been invited as a witness with the statements made by Schütz. Sewing said she didn't know the mail – which is believable. "The email is a rare glimpse into the minds of a supervisory board of Deutsche Bank and anything but a sheet of fame for the largest financial group in Germany," said Zimmermann after the meeting ntv.de. Fabio De Masi, who is working through the Wirecard debacle for the left in parliament, saw the statements as evidence of the "tight feeling in the German financial elite". Schütz is "one of Braun's last friends". De Masi tweeted: "It is instructive that Mr. Sewing did not want to distance himself clearly from that either!" Whereupon Deutsche Bank spokesman Jörg Eigendorf spoke up, which suggests that the group is anything but enthusiastic about the statements made by its supervisory board member: "We only found out about such an email this night. We generally comment on private statements Supervisory board members are not. However, regardless of this, both the content and the attitude of the quoted statement are unacceptable – regardless of who it comes from.

Zimmermann also recalled that "even the appointment of Mr. Schütz to the Supervisory Board of Deutsche Bank had been controversial". "His reputation in the financial world is far from perfect." Schütz had managed the shares of the heavily indebted conglomerate Hainan Jiaoguan Holding (HNA), a Chinese holding company that market observers classed as very opaque, through his finance company C-Quadrat. Even Sewing's predecessor John Cryan long refused to meet the head of HNA. Deutsche Bank bought back the shares. A very small part remained in the HNA structure, which the company took over from Schütz, who is Austrian like Markus Braun, at the end of 2019. Schütz moved to the supervisory board for HNA in May 2017, and his mandate runs until 2023.

The Austrian founded the private security company Aventus in Vienna, which mentions "acquisition, security and control of information" as a "core competence" on its website. Your managing director Gerald Karner explains: "In the globalized business world, well-founded background information on people and companies from non-public sources is necessary in order to be able to take the right steps."

"I was wrong"

Schütz tried to limit the damage. Like many others who were directly or indirectly involved in the scandal, he justified his choice of words with ignorance and trust. "At the beginning of 2019 I believed Markus Braun that Wirecard was a company with integrity that was wrongly defamed and that there was actually a media campaign initiated by short sellers against the company. It is now clear that I was wrong," he quoted as saying the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" in a statement for the newspaper. Schütz apologized to the "Financial Times and their reporters for this emotional and misplaced statement". He knows that they have made a significant contribution to exposing the scandal, for which the team around reporter Dan McCrum deserves credit.

McCrum recently received the German Reporter Award. The laudation was given by Federal Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, who praised the journalist as "an educator in the best history of press freedom". He is happy that the Munich public prosecutor's office "has stopped the investigation into McCrum and is now concentrating on the perpetrators," he said. The words triggered reactions between grins and loud laughter among connoisseurs of the matter. Scholz is the employer of the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (Bafin) – like Wirecard McCrum, she reported in April 2019 and started the investigation against the FT man.

* Editor's note: The quotes from the emails were taken from the original. Spelling and grammatical errors were not corrected.