Wirecard’s former chief accountant spoke for the first time on Wednesday at the ongoing trial over the $2 billion fraud scandal that brought down the German payments firm and acknowledged making mistakes.
Stephan von Erffa said he sometimes felt overwhelmed by his work, but rejected the accusations made against him by prosecutors.
“I had a lot to do and sometimes I felt like a juggler,” von Erffa told a Munich court.
“I see that I unfortunately made mistakes that I regret,” he said.
But the 49-year-old insisted he had never used his position to enrich himself and sought to play down his role at the scandal-hit company.
“I never participated in board meetings,” von Erffa said.
Wirecard imploded spectacularly in June 2020 after being forced to admit that €1.9 billion ($2.1 billion) in cash, which was supposed to be in trust accounts in Asia, did not actually exist.
The company’s former CEO, Austrian-born Markus Braun, has been in the dock since December alongside von Erffa and Oliver Bellenhaus, former head of Wirecard’s subsidiary in Dubai.
Prosecutors allege the trio fabricated revenue streams with third-party companies to inflate Wirecard’s accounts and make the loss-making company appear profitable.
In her testimony, von Erffa distanced herself from Braun, saying the former Wirecard boss was “inaccessible.”
He also said his earlier silence at the trial was due to his distrust of the prosecutor in charge of the case.
“I got the impression that they didn’t want any exculpatory evidence,” he said.
Bellenhaus, his co-defendant, admitted to the fraud and became the prosecution’s star witness, telling judges in December that Wirecard was “a scam” from the start with Braun “at the centre of it all”.
The collapse of Wirecard sent shockwaves across Germany and drew parallels with the accounting scandal at US energy giant Enron in the early 2000s.
This prompted a review by Germany’s financial watchdog BaFin, which has been widely criticised for ignoring early warnings about Wirecard.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who was finance minister at the time of the Wirecard implosion, described the scandal as “unprecedented” in Germany’s post-World War II history.— Agence France-Presse
