Germany

Financial engineering, like life, moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while you could miss it. Few companies have had to move faster this year than Tui, whose AGM presentation in mid February mentioned coronavirus only once, the Financial Times reported. “At present, we do not see any significant impact from the virus on our outlook,” chief executive Fritz Joussen told shareholders.

Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank provided the bulk of the funding for Wirecard’s acquisition of a pair of Indian companies referred to in the fraud allegations against the defunct Germany payments group, documents seen by the Financial Times reveal. In 2015 Wirecard turned to the German banks when it agreed to pay up to €340m to a Mauritius-based fund for two India-based sister companies, Hermes i Tickets and GI Technology, the Financial Times reported.

German perfume retailer Douglas is preparing for a financial restructuring in 2021 as the COVID-19 pandemic hits its business and its debt nears maturity, two people familiar with the matter said, Reuters reported. Once the important Christmas season is over, the company will kick off talks with its creditors on options including a refinancing, a deal to amend and extend maturities or a debt-for-equity swap, the sources said. Douglas’ outstanding loans and bonds mature from February 2022. In total, the company’s net debt stood at 2.1 billion euros ($2.5 billion) as of June 2020.

German prosecutors on Friday opened an investigation into partners at EY who audited Wirecard , after an accounting watchdog filed a report accusing them of criminality in their work for the failed payments company, Reuters reported. A spokeswoman for the Munich prosecutor’s office said it had examined the complaint brought by the APAS oversight board, adding that opening such an investigation was a procedural requirement. “We continue to conduct our investigations in the entire Wirecard complex against numerous suspects,” the spokeswoman said, adding the outcome of the inquiries was open.

EY has lashed out at Germany’s audit watchdog for prematurely reporting suspected criminal misconduct by its partners to prosecutors in an escalating battle over the Big Four firm’s audit work at defunct payments company Wirecard, the Financial Times reported in a commentary. Wirecard collapsed into insolvency in June in one of Europe’s biggest postwar accounting frauds after receiving “all clear” audits by EY for more than a decade. Apas, the German audit watchdog, told criminal prosecutors in late September that three current and former EY partners may have acted criminally.

Germany’s audit watchdog suspects EY partners knew they were issuing a “factually inaccurate” audit for Wirecard in 2017, according to four people familiar with the matter, the Financial Times reported. Apas, the Berlin-based audit oversight body, has reported EY to prosecutors, telling them that the firm may have acted criminally during its work for Wirecard, which collapsed into insolvency earlier this year in one of Europe’s largest fraud scandals.

The funeral directors will have to wait for their big get-together. So will the toymakers, the equestrians and the vegans. All those groups and many more had scheduled trade fairs to take place in Germany in recent months. But these rituals of business life, a chance for people to make deals, check out the competition and commune with others in the same walk of life, are in crisis, the International New York Times reported. The mass cancellation of trade fairs has been a disaster for hotels, restaurants and taxi drivers around the world, but especially in Germany.

Germany’s audit watchdog is investigating Deutsche Bank’s head of accounting Andreas Loetscher over potential misconduct in his previous role at EY, where he was one of the partners responsible for the audits of Wirecard, the Financial Times reported. Wirecard, a once high-flying payments company, received unqualified audits from EY for more than a decade before it collapsed into insolvency this summer. Mr Loetscher, who joined Germany’s largest lender in May 2018 after a two-decade long career at the Big Four firm, is one of at least two Wirecard auditors who are personally being

German insurers are in the final stages of negotiating a six-month extension to a COVID-19 credit insurance backstop with the German government, Reuters reported. Insurers and the government struck a deal earlier this year for up to 30 billion euros ($35.64 billion) in guarantees for the commercial credit insurance industry for 2020, a move important for fostering the smooth flow of trade during the pandemic. With 2020 winding down, Joerg Asmussen, head of the GDV German insurance association, said an agreement for the extension could be reached “within days”.

Thyssenkrupp, the ailing German steel and materials group, plunged to a full-year loss of €5.5bn and said it would cut 5,000 more jobs, as the pandemic increased pressure on the former conglomerate to speed up the sale of underperforming businesses, the Financial Times reported. The Essen-based company, which still employs more than 100,000 people, also warned that it expected a further loss of at least €1bn this financial year, as its restructuring costs spiral.