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EY has won its first new DAX-listed audit client since the collapse of payments group Wirecard, despite being banned from winning audit mandates from listed German companies.
Qiagen, a biotech group listed in New York and Frankfurt, has hired the Big Four company as a new group auditor From January it will replace KPMG, which has held the mandate for a decade.
EY The firm took on the mandate months after it agreed to a two-year ban on taking on new listed auditing clients in Germany after allegedly breaching its professional duties in its audits of Wirecard, which collapsed in 2020 in one of Europe’s biggest ever accounting scandals.
Qiagen’s mandate, which has an annual turnover of €2 billion and a market capitalization of €10 billion, highlights the limits of national audit regulation in Europe.
Although Qiagen’s European headquarters are in the German town of Hilden, near Düsseldorf, and the company is one of the 40 members of the German blue-chip index Dax, it is incorporated in the Netherlands, having moved its legal headquarters to Venlo in 1996.
“We are a company incorporated in the Netherlands with global stocks listed on the NYSE in the United States and also in Germany,” Qiagen said in a statement.
German audit regulator Apas did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Wirecard fraud plunged EY Germany, which had carried out unrestricted audits for the payments group for almost a decade, into crisis. Despite repeated whistleblower complaints and critical press coverage, the company overlooked the fact that 1.9 billion euros in corporate funds and half of Wirecard’s revenue were counterfeit.
After an investigation lasting several years, Apas completed that EY’s audits were “at least” negligent and in some cases grossly negligent, the Financial Times previously reported. However, it could not be determined whether the company had acted with criminal intent.
Qiagen told the FT in its statement that it had “carried out a thorough review of the small group of global accounting firms” that could work for it given the requirement to meet both US and EU standards.
The company added that shareholders “voted 99.9 percent for EY” at Qiagen’s last annual general meeting in June. It officially hired EY’s Dutch division Ernst & Young Accountants LLP, but also signed an engagement agreement with the Big Four firm’s German division.
After the Wirecard scandal, EY lost a number of high-profile German audit clients, including Commerzbank, Deutsche Telekom, DWS and state lender KfW, and did not win any new mandates even before the two-year ban officially began to take effect this year.
The company has overhauled its German legal structure to separate auditing and consulting services, prompting allegations from former Wirecard shareholders about its potential Asset reduction They claim that this will make it more difficult, if not impossible, to enforce claims for damages due to alleged faulty audits of the disbanded payment group.
Former investors and Wirecard administrators are suing EY for billions of dollars in damages in a series of drawn-out and drawn-out lawsuits, the outcome of which remains uncertain.
People familiar with the matter told the FT that EY is bidding for a number of additional high-profile audit mandates in Germany that will be available from 2026, including pharmaceutical and agrochemical group Bayer, retailer Metro and tour operator Tui.
EY declined to comment.
