EY Germany Gives 40 Partners and 380 Staff the Boot to Boost Profitability After That Whole Wirecard Thing
EY has been tightening the purse strings over the past several months ahead of the big Project Everest split, the vote on which remains delayed and should happen before the end of this quarter. The firm did not hand out mid-year bonuses in December and sources say that travel, training, and even hiring are on […]
EY’s Europe Restructuring Is Just ‘Rearranging the Deckchairs on the Titanic’
“This is rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. To regulators, they have always been giving warnings that if you close one down, we will be the Big 3 – so leave us alone, as we are ‘too big to fail’. Fundamentally, it’s the leadership culture and aggressively commercial model of these firms which is broken […]
German Investigator Can Confidently Prove EY Was Unbelievably Bad At Auditing Wirecard
Bloomberg reported on Saturday: A special parliamentary investigator lists far-reaching shortcomings in Ernst & Young’s audits of Wirecard AG before the German financial technology company collapsed last year, a person familiar with the report said. The investigator lists about 11 incidences where EY failed to take measures to uncover the multibillion fraud, said the person, who spoke […]
Wirecard Drama of the Day: Hubert Barth Was Most Likely Forced Out as EY Germany CEO
Whether it’s in the sports world or the business world, whenever you see a press release or an article that says, “[PERSON’S NAME] is stepping down from [HIS/HER] role as [EXECUTIVE JOB TITLE] and will be taking another position with the [TEAM NAME/COMPANY NAME],” it’s because that person sucked at his/her job or something bad […]
Wirecard Drama of the Day: EY … Y U No Listen to Whistleblower?
A new Financial Times report once again makes EY look completely incompetent as the auditors of the ill-fated German payments company Wirecard: 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 revelation that an EY […]
Wirecard Drama of the Day: EY Is Bleeding Audit Clients In Germany
Earlier this month, Commerzbank, Germany’s second-largest lender, and DWS Group, Deutsche Bank’s asset-management arm, both decided against using EY Germany as their auditor because they were freaked out by how bad this Wirecard accounting scandal has become. This was followed by EY Global Chairman and CEO Carmine Di Sibio sending a letter to clients, expressing […]
Wirecard Drama of the Day: Hundreds Got Pink Slips at German Headquarters
This was actually reported on Wednesday by several outlets, including the Financial Times, so in case you were spending more time on your OnlyFans side hustle than on work yesterday and missed it: Wirecard’s administrator has cancelled the contracts of its chief executive and two other senior managers while cutting 730 staff at the collapsed […]
Wirecard Drama of the Day: The Dismantling Has Begun
Parts of way-too-fraud-y German payments company Wirecard are being sold off in the U.K. and Brazil, according to the Financial Times: The break-up of the collapsed German payments company Wirecard has started after it agreed to sell the remnants of its UK business to Railsbank, a UK start-up backed by Visa, and sold its Brazilian […]
Wirecard Drama of the Day: Where, Oh Where, Is Jan Marsalek?
Jan Marsalek, the former Wirecard chief operating officer who is considered one of the maestros of the multibillion-euro accounting scandal that obliterated the German payments company, is on the lamb lam. He might be in the Philippines. He might be in Russia. He might be in Belarus. But no one knows exactly where the dude […]
Wirecard Drama of the Day: At Least This Wasn’t EY’s Fault
According to a report cited by Bloomberg, a former Wirecard manager who was found dead in the Philippines last week died of blood poisoning in a Manila hospital. Bloomberg wrote: Authorities in the Philippines have yet to confirm that the man, Christopher Bauer, is the former Asian executive of the payments firm who is part […]
Wirecard Drama of the Day: Germany’s Audit Cops Are Trying to Dig Up Some Dirt on EY
So sayeth Reuters: The German body in charge of regulating auditors is examining the work of EY, the auditor that approved the books of collapsed payment services firm Wirecard, the German Economy Ministry said on Monday. The ministry said Auditors’ Regulator (Apas) had upgraded a preliminary investigation that had been running since October 2019, when […]
EY Partners Told How to EYsplain Wirecard Mess to Clients
The Financial Times reported on Monday: EY has told its partners how to prepare for difficult conversations with clients about its audits of Wirecard, the German payments company that has filed for insolvency after admitting that €1.9bn of cash probably never existed. In an internal note to senior partners on Friday, EY advised them to tell […]
Big 4 Lawsuits: Wirecard Investors vs. EY, Australian Tax Office vs. PwC, Carillion vs. KPMG
Here’s a round-up of lawsuits filed against Big 4 firms in Germany, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Ernst & Young Sued Over Wirecard as Accounting Woes Add Up [Bloomberg] Wirecard’s longtime auditor EY is being sued just days after the payment processing company’s headquarters were raided as part of a market-manipulation probe. The German lawsuit […]
Accounting Fraud Watch: Luckin Cleans House, Wirecard’s Woes, Ex-Penn West Execs Pay Up
Luckin Coffee sacks CEO, COO for alleged fraud [Reuters] Chinese coffee chain and Starbucks wannabe Luckin Coffee fired its CEO Jenny Zhiya Qian and COO Jian Liu following an internal investigation on the fabrication of annual sales numbers, the company said on May 12. Luckin revealed in April that much of its 2019 sales of […]