In Germany the duty to file for insolvency will apply again from 1 October for all businesses facing liquidity problems, bringing risks for companies which delay filing for insolvency, and making payments contestable again, Pinsent Masons reported. For businesses in crisis due to the impact of Covid-19, the German Federal Government had in March suspended the duty to file for insolvency until 30 September 2020. This suspension was extended, but only for overindebted businesses as far as they are still solvent.

Singapore’s central bank on Wednesday directed embattled German payments firm Wirecard to cease providing services in the city state and return all customers’ funds, Reuters reported. Wirecard, which primarily processes payments for merchants and helps companies to issue pre-paid cards in Singapore, filed for insolvency in June after a 1.9 billion euro (1.8 billion pounds) hole was discovered in its books. Singapore police are among a number of global authorities investigating Germany’s biggest post-war corporate fraud.

In a related story, the Financial Times reported that German police raided the headquarters of state-owned lender KfW this month as part of a criminal investigation into employees who approved an unsecured €100m loan to the collapsed payments group Wirecard. A spokesperson for KfW confirmed the raid, which happened two weeks ago, and said that the bank was co-operating with the investigation by Frankfurt prosecutors. Wirecard’s own headquarters on the outskirts of Munich were raided by police on Tuesday as part of the same investigation, according to people familiar with the matter.

EY was warned in 2016 by one of its own employees that senior managers at Wirecard may have committed fraud and one had attempted to bribe an auditor, The Irish Times reported. The revelation that an EY employee identified suspicious activity at Wirecard four years before the payments group imploded in Germany’s largest postwar corporate fraud will increase the pressure on the accounting firm, which audited Wirecard for more than a decade and provided unqualified audits until 2018.

Wirecard’s fabricated Asian business was not its only deception. The rest of the once-lauded German payment provider’s business was chaotic, beset by byzantine reporting lines, hobbled by lamentable IT and racking up losses, according to a report by Wirecard’s administrator and accounts of former employees, the Financial Times reported. The picture that emerges of the Wirecard businesses that did exist is a stark contrast to the one painted by former chief executive Markus Braun, who hailed the group as a highly profitable pioneer in the payments industry.

Germany would relax insolvency rules under proposals set out on Saturday to help avert a wave of bankruptcies in Europe’s biggest economy, provided companies hit by the coronavirus crisis have a robust business model, Reuters reported. Keen to avoid bankruptcies and mass layoffs, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government has launched a range of stimulus and relief measures as Germany braces for its biggest slump since World War Two, having shrunk by an unprecedented 9.7% in the second quarter.

Deutsche Bank AG plans to boost lending to commodity traders in the Middle East, even as other banks back away after a spate of defaults in the industry, to help double the size of its regional business, Bloomberg News reported. The German lender, which on Monday appointed Loic Voide and Kees Hoving as co-chief executive officers for the Middle East and Africa, is also targeting bond markets for growth in the region. “In the next five to six years, we would like to double the size of the revenues from what we have today,” Voide said in an interview.

The coronavirus pandemic is taking its toll on the world economy. GDPs of many countries are down as unemployment numbers rise, and companies are shutting up shop, Silicon Canals reported. One of Germany’s largest fintech startups Monedo can now be added to the list as it has filed for insolvency. The fintech’s insolvency application was granted by the Hamburg District Court that has also opened the preliminary insolvency proceedings. The news of Monedo filing for bankruptcy was first reported by Manager Magazin.

Lossmaking German truck and bus manufacturer MAN plans to cull up to one in four jobs globally in a move that will add to concerns about the strength of the recovery in Europe’s largest economy, the Financial Times reported. The cutting of up to 9,500 jobs is part of an overhaul of the business, designed to achieve a return on sales of 8 per cent by 2023 and generate about €1.8bn of cost savings, the company said on Friday.

The number of firms declaring insolvency in Germany was 6.2% lower than in the first half of last year despite the coronavirus crisis, the Statistics Office said, partly because of a rule designed to keep firms afloat in the pandemic, Reuters reported. In March, the government gave companies that find themselves in financial trouble due to the pandemic a respite by allowing them to delay filing for bankruptcy. That was later extended until the end of the year.