The industrial engineer Christof Irle, 42, is one of the many victims Wirecard shareholders. It outraged him that the Federal government, says Finance Minister Olaf Scholz (SPD), the financial Supervisory authority Bafin in the case of the hands of Wirecard have been bound. “Bafin has let the investors to Ruin run,” says Irle. Notes that the Wirecard AG manipulate their stock price, had to submit early. The Non-lawyer, found a lot of rules in the securities trading act, the Bafin’s audit obligations. However, the Bafin was not followed up. Therefore, Irle criminal has made a complaint against the Bafin for obstruction of justice. To prove “a breach of duty is difficult, but is out of the question, I also think it is not,” says Lars Haffke, a researcher at the TU Munich in the area of Corporate Governance.
The scandal at Wirecard is not the only case, in which the German financial Supervisory authority looks bad. The investor rip-off of P&R, the Panama Papers, Cum-Ex, the great banking crisis in the years 2007 and 2008, The Bafin, came either too late, or assessed the situation incorrectly, or the right tools had to discover the holes in the balance sheets and other dubious operations. The chronicle of the Bafin is also the chronicle of a failure.
Example is P&R: Many investors had their trust in the entrepreneur Heinz R. and container company, they had created many years your money had improved their pension or for a home Equity saved up, and none of them had noticed, had been able to notice, that his fortune was stuck in a snow ball system. No money investment scandal in Germany, had achieved to date, the dimensions of the P&R, as the fraud in the year 2017, the bubble burst. More than 50 000 of mostly older investors had invested a total of 3.5 billion euros. In Faith, they would buy shipping containers, and their rental and resale benefit, put many of them high amounts in the company.
In the end, it turned out: Of the officially specified, 1.6 million containers, only about 630 existed 000. More than two-thirds of the money is probably gone forever. Bafin, too, since in 2015 with a mandate for consumer protection, noted by the number of air nothing: they examined whether the system brochures and information sheets of the P&R group of goods complete, and the formal rules were. That was the case. Because P&R as part of the so-called Grey capital market, but fell under Bafin supervision, ended the jurisdiction of the authority at this point again.
If providers do not require the permission of the financial supervision and only a few legal requirements you must meet, it is called from the Grey capital market. The describes the Bafin itself, and advises consumers: “In the case of products that are offered there, you should be extra careful.” But enough of this warning? Gerhard Schick, Ex-member of the German Bundestag of the Greens, and today the chief of the organization’s financial turnaround, the fight against maladministration in the money industry, believes the. “The supervision has not asked critical questions to the provider of P&R, let alone a product ban, although there were numerous clues as to problems.”
Also in the case of the Panama Papers, Bafin did not look good
At the end of January 2019, Bafin chief Hufeld visited Chic and handed him the signatures of more than 3000 citizens, who demanded that financial supervision should finally Wake up and fraud as in the case of P&R stop. Hufeld said, according to the organization’s financial turnaround, among other things, with the words, no state protection, she said “the individual consumer from the responsibility to examine its financial products carefully and responsibly”.
Also in the Panama Papers, Bafin did not look good. In 2016, the published documents of a letter-box companies specialized law firm 28, German financial institutions are in various cropping up in the Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank and Bayern LB to hang. Many money houses have used the services of the law firm of Mossack Fonseca in Panama, to help your customers Hide money.
After the publication of the Bafin announced that the business of the banks a closer look. Bafin is not looked at but all 28 in the Panama Papers to the listed institutions, but only ten of them. And in these, the authority relied on to get the crucial documents actually handed out. The banks themselves decided what they sent to the Bafin and what is not.