ZCZC
BCN-09
GERMANY-FINANCE-REGULATE-BAFIN
Germany appoints new head of troubled finance watchdog
BERLIN, March 22, 2021 (BSS/AFP) – Germany has tapped Mark Branson from Swiss financial regulator Finma to head its beleaguered financial watchdog Bafin, the finance ministry said Monday.
Branson, a mathematician with Swiss and British citizenship, will take up the new post “in the middle of the year”, the ministry said in a statement.
He will succeed Felix Hufeld, who was sacked in January over Bafin’s failure to prevent the Wirecard fraud — Germany’s biggest accounting scandal in living memory.
Branson will be charged with implementing reforms announced in February designed to enable the regulator to identify fraud more quickly and effectively, with a bigger focus on whistleblowers.
With Branson “at the helm”, the regulator will continue with the reforms aimed at giving it “more teeth”, Finance Minister Olaf Scholz was quoted as saying.
Branson, 52, has been head of the Swiss financial market regulator Finma since 2014, having joined in 2010.
He was previously a senior executive at two Swiss banks, including UBS, where he managed Tom Hayes, a trader jailed in 2015 for conspiring to rig the benchmark Libor interest rate.
Bafin has been accused of lax oversight and of missing early warning signs at Wirecard, which collapsed last June after admitting that 1.9 billion euros ($2.1 billion) was missing from its accounts.
The regulator has also faced criticism that it acted too late in the case of Greensill Bank, declared insolvent last week after the collapse of its British owner, financial services firm Greensill.
BSS/AFP/TIT/1924 HRS