Tens of thousands of Wirecard shareholders have filed claims in the insolvency proceedings, with little chance of success so far. Thanks to the Munich Higher Regional Court, they can now hope – at least until the next ruling
Following a new decision by the Munich Higher Regional Court, a good 50,000 Wirecard shareholders can hope for compensation in the insolvency proceedings for the time being. The fifth OLG Senate has decided that Wirecard shareholders can file their claims in the insolvency proceedings. The asset management company Union Investment, which had bought Wirecard shares for 33 of its customers from 2015 to 2020, filed a lawsuit against the insolvency administrator Michael Jaffé. The “Süddeutsche Zeitung” first reported this.
The case is not yet closed. It is a so-called “interim judgment” and the judges in the case did not decide on the reasoning or the amount of the compensation claims filed by Union Investment.
In the first instance, the Munich Regional Court rejected the claim. The next word will now be the Federal Court of Justice (BGH). Insolvency administrator Jaffé wants the highest court in Karlsruhe to clarify whether the claims of shareholders have the same rank as the claims of creditors to whom a bankrupt company owes money. A spokesman for Jaffé confirmed this. The Higher Regional Court also points out in its interim judgment that the highest court has not yet decided whether claims for damages by shareholders are insolvency claims under the Insolvency Code.
In total, a lot of money is at stake: According to the Higher Regional Court, around 50,000 Wirecard shareholders have filed claims for damages amounting to around 8.5 billion euros. In total, Wirecard creditors are demanding 15.4 billion euros. So far, insolvency administrator Jaffé has secured 650 million euros from the insolvency estate. Unless billions of missing money unexpectedly turn up, the creditors will only receive a small part of their claims in any case.
The insolvency administrator sees the claims of creditors as having priority. The reason: Wirecard owes a lot of money to both lending banks and former employees. Shareholders, on the other hand, may have suffered losses in share prices, but have neither lent the company any money nor provided any other services for which Wirecard would have failed to pay. If the shareholders had claims of equal rank, there would be much less money left for the creditors, argues Jaffé.
The collapse of the Dax group in the summer of 2020 resulted in hundreds of civil lawsuits in addition to the criminal proceedings. The majority of these lawsuits are claims for damages brought by former Wirecard shareholders and investors against former CEO Markus Braun, who has been in custody since the summer of 2020, and the auditing firm EY, which had certified the allegedly false Wirecard balance sheets.
Source: Stern
