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Deutsche Bank’s asset manager DWS has named EY as its new group auditor despite taking the accounting firm to court for its involvement in the Wirecard scandal.
The appointment, which is subject to shareholder approval, would be the second high-profile mandate that the Big Four group has won since being banned from taking on new listed audit clients in Germany because of failures in its work for the collapsed payments company.
EY’s ban took effect in March 2024, which means it is free to take on clients from the end of March 2026.
DWS investors will be asked to vote on EY’s appointment as the asset management group’s statutory auditor for the 2026 financial year. The vote is likely to be a formality, however, as Deutsche Bank owns almost 80 per cent of DWS and is already audited by EY.
“This is not a completely ordinary situation, but, of course, some people are very pleased,” a person familiar with EY’s position said. “It shows that EY is still a relevant player despite the Wirecard legacy.”
Several funds managed by DWS bought shares worth hundreds of millions of euros in Wirecard shortly before the company collapsed in 2020 in one of Europe’s biggest ever accounting scandals.
DWS subsidiaries later sued EY on behalf of the funds affected.
The German asset manager said the appointment of EY as group-level auditor would not raise conflict of interest issues despite the ongoing legal action because an alternative auditor would be engaged to carry out the audits of the funds taking legal action against the Big Four firm.
“Possible, albeit unlikely, conflicts of interest are avoided by the fact that these subsidiaries will not be audited by EY Germany.” The asset manager declined to comment further on “ongoing legal disputes”.
The asset manager will retain French accountancy firm Mazars to audit the subsidiaries that are suing EY, with those audit results then incorporated into EY’s group audit.
Mazars and EY already work together on the audit of Deutsche Bank Group, people familiar with the matter said.
EY has lost market share in Germany since the Wirecard scandal broke in 2020, with the firm eventually accepting the two-year ban and €500,000 fine imposed by the country’s accounting watchdog in March last year.
DWS would be the second new German listed client after the ban came into force, following Qiagen, a biotech group listed in New York and Frankfurt.
DWS had initially planned to take on EY as its group auditor in 2020, but reversed its plans over concerns that it could become conflicted in a number of proposed lawsuits against Wirecard or EY, which audited the failed company for a decade.
It stayed with KPMG, which has audited DWS since it went public in 2018 and received €6mn a year for the mandate.
Mazars and EY declined to comment.
