MUNICH (dpa-AFX) - According to its own account, Commerzbank aroused suspicion relatively early in the Wirecard fraud scandal. In the end, however, the bank suffered losses presumably in the hundreds of millions because the bank's top management could not find a way to terminate the business relationship immediately.

According to former Chief Risk Officer Marcus Chromik, the bank discovered several hundred transactions with suspected money laundering at Wirecard in 2018 and 2019 and decided on a "soft exit" to end the business relationship. "This can't go on, we have to exit," said the top manager on Thursday as a witness in the Wirecard trial in Munich, describing the decision made by the bank's management at the time.

With a loan share of 200 million euros, Commerzbank was the consortium leader of the 15 banks that had granted Wirecard a joint credit line of up to 1.75 billion euros. According to the indictment, the scandal group had actually lent a good 1.6 billion euros. After the Wirecard bankruptcy in June 2020, most of the money was lost.

The public prosecutor's office accuses the former CEO and his two co-defendants of deliberately defrauding the banks in order to keep the Wirecard Group, which was actually in deficit, afloat. The former CEO Markus Braun, who has been in custody for four years, denies this as well as all other accusations.

Chromik was the first former board member of one of the banks affected by the scandal to testify as a witness on the 133rd day of the trial. In addition to the decision to "exit", the bank also reportedly filed several hundred money laundering complaints against its long-standing client Wirecard at the beginning of 2019.

According to Chromik, an immediate termination was also discussed at the bank's management level. However, this would not have been legally possible. In view of the fact that Commerzbank had raised suspicions, a sale of the credit exposure would also have been "non-trivial", Chromik said.

Commerzbank therefore decided not to exit until the next extension of the syndicated loan was due - but before that, Wirecard filed for insolvency. The manager noted that the financial supervisory authority Bafin and the German judiciary were still marching in the other direction at that time in the spring and were instead investigating whether Wirecard could be the target of criminal machinations by share speculators. "The exit from a DAX company would have been unique in the history of the bank," said Chromik. "We didn't know whether we were completely wrong and would then look like fools on the market."/DP/jha