HAMBURG (dpa-AFX) - According to a press report, the supervisory board of the copper producer and recycling company Aurubis is drawing far-reaching consequences from the theft and fraud cases at the MDax group. Rainer Verhoeven, the CFO responsible for risk management, and Heiko Arnold, Chief Production Officer, will have to leave in the short term, as "Manager Magazin" (MM) wrote on Monday, citing company circles. Resolutions to this effect are to be passed by the relevant Supervisory Board committees on Tuesday. CEO Roland Harings will have until the end of the financial year at the latest to prepare the handover to a successor. Only Inge Hofkens, the new Chief Recycling Officer appointed a year ago, will remain in office. A company spokesperson did not wish to comment on the report. The share price recently fell by 3.8 percent.

Aurubis was the victim of a large-scale fraud last year. The bottom line is a shortfall in valuable metals worth 169 million euros. In one case, manipulated samples with high levels of valuable metals were submitted, but the deliveries contained significantly less of them. As a result, over-invoices were ultimately paid. In addition, however, there is another - according to the annual report "not fully comprehensible" - shortfall in precious metals in the low three-digit million euro range.

The company had already announced in December that the Supervisory Board could neither rule out that the current members of the Executive Board would continue in office unchanged, nor that there would be a premature separation of individual or several members of the Executive Board. At the beginning of January, the invitation to the Annual General Meeting then stated that the actions of the Supervisory Board and the Management Board would not yet be approved at the online event on February 15. "The background to this is the ongoing investigations into the criminal activities directed against the company, which have led to shortfalls in precious metals," it said at the time./mis/men/jha/