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EY has signed its first new DAX-listed audit client since the collapse of payments group Wirecard, despite a ban on winning audit mandates from listed German companies.
Qiagen, a biotechnology group listed in New York and Frankfurt, has appointed a Big Four company as its new group auditor From January, she will replace KPMG, which has been in charge for a decade.
any He took over the mandate months after accepting a two-year ban on dealing with new audit clients listed in Germany following alleged breaches of his professional duties in its audits of Wirecard, which collapsed in 2020 in one of Europe's biggest ever accounting scandals.
The mandate given to Qiagen, which has annual revenues of €2 billion and a market capitalization of €10 billion, highlights the limitations of national audit regulation in Europe.
While Qiagen's European operational headquarters is in the German town of Hilden near Düsseldorf and the company is one of the 40 members of the German DAX blue-chip index, it is incorporated in the Netherlands, having moved its legal headquarters to Venlo in 1996.
“We are a Dutch registered company with global shares listed in the US on the New York Stock Exchange and also in Germany,” Qiagen said in a statement.
German audit watchdog Abbas did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Wirecard fraud has thrown EY Germany, which has issued unqualified audits of the payments group for nearly a decade, into crisis. Despite repeated whistleblower complaints and critical press coverage, the company missed the fact that €1.9 billion of the company's funds and half of Wirecard's revenues were fake.
After an investigation lasting several years, Abbas That's it The Financial Times previously reported that EY's audits were “to say the least” negligent and in some cases grossly negligent. However, it has not been determined whether the company acted with criminal intent.
Qiagen told the Financial Times in a statement that it “conducted a comprehensive review of the small group of global audit firms” that could work for it, given the requirement to meet US and EU standards.
Shareholders “voted 99.9 percent in favor” of EY at Qiagen's last annual meeting in June, the company added. It has formally hired EY's Dutch division Ernst & Young Accountants LLP, but has also signed a partnership letter with the Big Four firm's German unit.
In the wake of the Wirecard scandal, EY lost a string of high-profile German audit clients, including Commerzbank, Deutsche Telekom, DWS and state-owned bank KfW, and did not win any new mandates even before the two-year ban officially began to impact that economy. year.
The company overhauled its German legal structure to separate audit and consulting services, leading to allegations from former Wirecard shareholders about the potential for this to happen. Asset divestiture Which they claim will make it difficult, if not impossible, to enforce compensation claims for the defunct payments group's allegedly flawed audits.
Former investors and Wirecard's director are suing EY for billions of euros in damages in a series of slow-moving and protracted lawsuits whose outcome remains uncertain.
People familiar with the matter told the Financial Times that EY had been touting a series of additional high-level audit mandates in Germany that would become available from 2026, including for pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals group Bayer, retailer Metro, and holiday operator TUI.
EY declined to comment.
