(Bloomberg) -- Aurubis AG has cleared out its top management, including Chief Executive Officer Roland Harings, as the copper producer seeks to move on from a giant raw-material scam.

The company has terminated the contracts of Harings, Chief Financial Officer Rainer Verhoeven and Chief Operating Officer Heiko Arnold, Aurubis said Tuesday. 

Aurubis sent shockwaves through the European copper industry in August when it said it had been hit by a sophisticated scam perpetrated by suppliers and complicit employees. The fraud — which involved valuable scrap raw materials — followed on from a smaller theft discovered a few months earlier, and raised uncomfortable questions about the company’s security controls.

The leadership changes follow Aurubis’s decision to carry out an independent legal probe into a criminal scam that cost the copper producer about €169 million ($184 million) last year. The firm warned in December that it may make executive changes once the review was concluded.

“The three board members are thus taking accountability for the unique challenges Aurubis faced in the past fiscal year, especially in light of the serious cases of fraud and theft at the Hamburg plant and work safety incidents,” the company said. 

The CEO will leave at the end of September, while the CFO will leave at the end of June. Arnold will depart at the end of next month.

Aurubis said its supervisory board had begun the process of looking for replacements. 

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