The Participants’ cooperation is required

Originally, the Foundation planned that, if out-of-court settlement negotiations with EY would not prove successful, a lawsuit would be filed on behalf of all investors in the form of a so-called subjective joint litigation in order to protect the claims from the limitation period and to jointly enforce them against EY. Such litigation would have been carried out on the basis of powers of attorney from the investors to the Foundation and the German law firm Nieding + Barth.

However, due to a recent change in the legal opinion of the Munich Regional Court I, filing a lawsuit in the form of a subjective joint action carries a significant risk of being split into countless individual lawsuits. This is precisely what the Foundation wants to avoid. In order to pursue and enforce the claims jointly – as a community – on behalf of all investors a different approach is necessary.

In order to pursue this joint approach further, the so-called "assignment model" has been developed.

Under this assignment model, the investors registered with the Foundation – i.e. the participants in the foundation – assign their claims in trust to a company established specifically for this purpose on a fiduciary basis. The special feature of such a fiduciary assignment is that the company may sue for the assigned claims in its own name and in a joint action but may only dispose of the claim vis-à-vis the assigning investors in order to enforce their damage claims. Under this assignment model, the relevant company continues to be authorized to dispose of the assigned claims by way of settlement, as was also provided for under the original model of subjective joint litigation. In this way, it remains possible for the Foundation to bundle the claims of all participants and keep the procedural costs for the financier at a manageable level. The originally intended approach is thus maintained with the assignment model.

Such a company has already been established in the form of Collective Redress Deutschland GmbH, Peter-Müller-Straße 14, 40468 Düsseldorf, Germany (hereinafter referred to as "CRD GmbH"). CRD GmbH has already applied for the necessary registration with the responsible authority under the German Legal Services Act (RDG), which registration is expected to be completed shortly.

The assignment model is made possible by sending the assignment agreement and the General Terms and Conditions (GTC) to the participants of the Foundation by email. The assignment agreement must be signed in wet-ink by hand and the original document must be sent to CRD-GmbH immediately, but not later than 1-12-2023. Furthermore, a scan or (clearly readable) photograph of the complete assignment agreement is to be sent in advance to [email protected]

The Foundation asks for your attention that it cannot continue to act for the respective participant without the signed assignment agreement. Should the above-mentioned deadline pass without the respective participant having a signed assignment agreement, the Foundation assumes that this participant is not interested in pursuing his/her claims further. The Foundation asks that this deadline be taken seriously, as otherwise timely processing cannot be guaranteed.

The registration authority of CRD-GmbH is the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf, Cecilienallee 3, 40474 Düsseldorf.