Responsibility of the auditing bodies

(1) Associations, auditors and auditing firms are obliged to a conscientious and impartial audit and to secrecy. They may not exploit, without authorisation, trade or business secrets that they have learned of in their activity. Whoever intentionally or negligently breaches his or her duties is liable to the cooperative for the resulting damage. Several persons are liable as joint and several debtors.
(2) The liability to compensate of persons who have acted negligently is limited to one million euros for one audit. This also applies where several persons have taken part in the audit, or several acts giving rise to an obligation to compensate have been committed, and without regard to whether other participants acted intentionally.
(3) The association may communicate copies of the audit reports to an umbrella association to which it belongs; the umbrella association may exploit them as required for the performance of the duties incumbent on it. The association is entitled to make a copy of an audit report available, in whole or in extracts, to the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, where it gives rise to indications that the audited cooperative is not pursuing a permissible promotional purpose but is investing its assets according to a fixed investment strategy, such that an investment asset within the meaning of section 1(1) of the Capital Investment Code might exist.
(4) The obligation to secrecy under subsection (1), first sentence exists, where an auditing firm carries out the audit, also as against the supervisory board and the members of the supervisory board of the auditing firm. The chairperson of the supervisory board of the auditing firm and his or her deputy may, however, inspect the reports rendered by the auditing firm, but may exploit the knowledge thereby obtained only insofar as the performance of the supervisory board's duty of supervision requires this.
(5) Liability under these provisions may neither be excluded nor limited by contract; the same applies to the liability of the association for the persons of whom it makes use to carry out the audit.