Germany

Germany’s finance minister denied any blame for the multi-billion-euro Wirecard fraud on Thursday, pointing the finger at the company and its auditors, EY, for waving the firm’s accounts through for a decade, Reuters reported. Olaf Scholz joins a long list of politicians and officials who have denied responsibility for slipshod oversight and what critical lawmakers see as a pro-Wirecard bias that failed to avert Germany’s biggest post-war fraud.

The sticky issue of affordable housing moved up Germany’s political agenda after the country’s top court overturned Berlin’s controversial rent freeze, Bloomberg News reported. The decision on Thursday by the Federal Constitutional Court to topple the aggressive clampdown on rents exposes thousands of voters to higher living expenses and highlights the housing squeeze in German cities. “The ruling is bitter, hitting tenants in 1.5 million Berlin flats hard,” said Lukas Siebenkotten, president of Germany’s tenant association.

The German shipyard Nobiskrug has filed for insolvency, according to reports by German news broadcasters, Super Yacht Times reported. During the filings and insolvency proceedings, which commenced on 12 April, Nobiskrug cited “critical developments” on yacht construction having had negative consequences on investment and potential profitability, as the main reasons.

Auditors and finance chiefs of some of Germany’s biggest businesses are worried that a new regulatory proposal intended to improve audit quality in the wake of the Wirecard AG scandal will lead to higher costs and less competition, the Wall Street Journal reported. German lawmakers currently are debating draft legislation for the so-called Act to Strengthen Financial Market Integrity. The law is expected to pass over the next few months, ahead of the country’s national elections in the fall.

Credit Suisse Group AG’s double-barreled financial crisis shares a common theme: a bank that looked the other way when warning signs argued for pulling back on lucrative corners of its business, the Wall Street Journal reported. The Swiss bank with a big Wall Street presence was caught off guard starting in late February when $10 billion in complicated investment funds it ran with financing firm Greensill Capital unraveled, despite years of internal warnings about the relationship.

A German lawyer handling the insolvency of Greensill Capital’s bank unit won a request to freeze the collapsed lender’s Australian assets, as part of an effort to cooperate with counterparts to recover as much as possible for the supply-chain finance firm’s creditors. Michael Frege had submitted an application to the Federal Court of Australia on March 31 asking for the court to hand over insolvency proceedings on the business to the German unit, where the entity has its “main interest,” according to court documents.

D-RT Group, the parent of Dutch tour operator D-reizen, has been declared bankrupt, a court spokesman said on Tuesday, potentially affecting more than 1,000 employees, Reuters reported. The Netherlands has largely avoided corporate bankruptcies during the pandemic as employers are able to receive government support to continue paying employees. “This is a pitch black day for us” broadcaster NOS quoted CEO Jan Henne de Dijn as saying, adding the company, a unit of German firm Raiffeisen Touristik Group GmbH, had been in talks to avoid bankruptcy.

Germany’s banking private banking association said on Monday that it had paid out around 2.7 billion euros ($3.17 billion) to more than 20,500 Greensill Bank customers as part of its deposit guarantee scheme after the bank collapsed last month, Reuters reported. The banking association said only a few customers had yet to receive compensation under the protection fund, which protects individuals but not institutional investors. Read more.