Since the end of 2022, the Wirecard scandal has been under trial at the Munich Regional Court. Witness and former supervisory board member Vuyiswa M’Cwabeni explains why even the Supervisory Board failed to prevent it. Her testimony is partly disturbing, court reporters say. She tells of appeasement, moments of shock and bewilderment. The former Wirecard supervisory board member M’Cwabeni testified in the Munich Wirecard trial.
The Allegedly Distrustful Supervisory Board Member
Vuyiswa M’Cwabeni, she is the founder and CEO of the German Fintech Infinicash, was a member of the supervisory board of the Dax group that collapsed between 2016 and 2020. The former CEO Markus Braun and two co-defendants have been on trial at the Munich Regional Court for a good nine months. What the 45-year-old has to say makes it even more difficult for Braun to present himself as innocent.
She reports of increasingly suspicious supervisors who were repeatedly thwarted by Braun herself in attempts to clarify the facts. That was the case, for example, with an audit report by the law firm Rajah Tann, which was supposed to track down questionable Wirecard transactions and left more questions than answers. “Braun didn’t want us to contact them directly and forbade it,” M’Cwabeni said, referring to the law firm’s experts.
Finally, during a special audit by KPMG, Braun openly opposed the supervisory board and published an untrue ad hoc announcement to the stock exchange, suppressing serious allegations, he said. In 2020, KPMG was to finally clarify whether a questionable third-party business (TPA) and allegedly high sums in escrow accounts in Asia really existed. The auditors said this was impossible due to a lack of information by Wirecard and its alleged partners. Braun made an acquittal out of it in his ad hoc release. There was no evidence of fraud, he said.
“The supervisory board was shocked throughout,” said M’Cwabeni, describing the board’s reaction to Braun going it alone. “It was about misrepresentation of facts,” she charged Braun as a witness in court. The disgruntled panel, she said, demanded that Braun provide a corrected ad hoc communication that reflected the truth. Braun refused. At the time, it was clear to the Supervisory Board that Braun and other members of the Board of Management were no longer going forward.
The Almost Fired Board!
They had wanted to fire him and his now fugitive colleague Jan Marsalek and appoint new board members. But the Wirecard bankruptcy intervened.
Once the panel investigated who was the trustee of nearly €2 billion that was supposed to be resting in accounts in Asia, it identified a “shady person with a dark past.” When Wirecard went bust, the billions were gone. Investigators believe they never existed.
The supervisory board allegedly also had a hard time finding the truth: If they wanted to speak to someone responsible for the TPA business, no one had an appointment free, the person suddenly fell ill, or the computer wasn’t working, M’Cwabeni says. If documents were requested, there were always delays and excuses, even to auditors, as to why this was not possible.
Preliminary Conclusion
Vuyiswa M’Cwabeni‘s testimony fits perfectly with a Supervisory Board that has not understood its function. It has a legal obligation to monitor the Board of Management and has appropriate options if it suspects that the Board of Management is not working properly. On the contrary, it is obliged to take action if it is suspicious, as it says. She seems to be one of those supervisory board members who collected good bonuses at Wirecard over the course of a year and looked the other way. That is a breach of duty. In this respect, this statement does not seem very credible to us.
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