[ad_1]
The Financial Times journalist who revealed the Wirecard fraud talks about the threats, harassment and persecution he faced for 5 years in Germany’s biggest scandal, where investors lost 25 billion euros.
The most interesting article I read this year (and as a job satisfaction) is about the history of Wirecard, Germany’s biggest fraud and biggest stock market crash.
The article is written by Dan McCrum, a journalist for the Financial Times, who together with Stefania Palma are the main authors of the revelations in the Financial Times, and who revealed this fraud that was covered up as incompetence, if not “corruption”.
You can read the original FT article here. Business Magazine also did a summary.
Since the first article in 2015 questioning the figures put forward by the pride of German tech companies for five years, journalist Dan McCrum has battled with Wirecard, German supervisors, lawyers and detectives hired by company bosses to track, harass and to threat.
“You are a murderer”, “You will end up in jail” were some of the messages this journalist received.
Why was this company, Wirecard, a payment processor important? In the last five years, the company’s shares have multiplied by 7, reaching the maximum market capitalization, at 25 billion dollars, being the shares included in the famous German DAX stock index.
When stocks go up 7 times, a lot of people make money, but you have to find some “suckers” to buy those stocks.
In addition, annually, Wirecard paid more than 120 million euros to consulting companies of all kinds.
Those responsible for the company even had access to the German political world.
Dan McCrum reveals in his FT article that, for fear of being hired by Wirecard, he secluded himself for several months in a small windowless office next to the FT main office, where he worked on a computer. Special computer disconnected from the central network and where it tried to gather the information and documents collected.
Wirecard also spread rumors that the journalists who deal with this issue are corrupt, being in the hands of speculators who had bet on the collapse of these shares.
Instead of verifying for itself and not relying on the company’s explanations whether the data presented by FT about the existence of a possible Wirecard fraud is true or not, BaFin, the German capital market surveillance authority, the equivalent of our ASF, sued McCrum.
The German press was on Wirecard’s side, so the Financial Times and the journalists involved in this case were blacklisted, accused of being part of an international Anglo-Saxon conspiracy that wants to overthrow the only German technology company It could compete with the American giants.
Ironically, Dan McCrum says the Financial Times good morning greeting has been replaced with “Haven’t you arrested yet?”
EY, the Wirecard auditor, has had his eyes closed for years, although at one point one of his field auditors raised the alarm that there were problems with the Asian operations.
Wirecard process and casino payments.
When everyone seemed to think that the disclosures in the Financial Times were going nowhere – yet it had been 5 years since the first article – and the authorities had discovered nothing wrong earlier this summer, following a special audit of KPMG, another audit conducted in place of EY, found that some Philippine bank documents were nothing more than forgeries and that there were no 1.9 billion euros. In fact, it never would have existed. But with this money, Wirecard reported better and better results, and the shares grew.
After the KPMG report, the tsunami hit.
Markus Braun, CEO of Wirecard and a major shareholder, was arrested.
Jan Marsalek, COO and mastermind of the fraud, has been missing since the summer. FT revealed that this character had connections to the secret services in Russia and Austria.
An Asian COO committed suicide.
Wirecard went into bankruptcy and crashed on the stock market, leaving behind many investors who lost their money, believing the story told by the company and the authorities more than the Financial Times.
Wirecard’s extremely profitable and non-fraud Romanian operations were acquired two weeks ago by a Portuguese group, in a transaction estimated by ZF at more than $ 50 million.
The story written by Dan McCrum at FT is fabulous and reveals many things behind the success stories of the stock market, where large companies, supervisors, auditing and consulting firms ironically shake hands.
P.S. In Romania, NN Pensii Pilonul II, the second largest pension fund, with more than 3 million contributors, bought in 2018 and 2019 shares of Wirecard worth 120 million lei, when they were at the top of the stock market, although they existed on the market. the Financial Times disclosures.
When ZF asked how NN Pensii Pilonul II in Romania came to buy shares of Wirecard in Germany, as if investments in Romania had been exhausted, and who came up with this undeniable investment opportunity and how much money was lost (or won), the Answers from NN Pensii, ASF and the Association of Pension Administrators were three long letters, almost indigo children, that we do not understand how investment portfolios are managed and that there was nothing wrong with this investment in legal terms. I didn’t even support this, just asked how much money was lost.
For ASF, the fact that BaFin, the German supervisory authority, whose competence could not be questioned, sued the FT journalists for what they disclosed and wrote, was enough to stop other issues regarding the placement made by NN Pensions Pillar II in Wirecard stock.
Fortunately, now everyone is questioning BaFin’s competence to oversee its own financial market.
And SIF Transylvania, where there are several million Romanian shareholders, most of them unknowingly from the massive privatization process of the early 1990s, invested in shares of Wirecard and lost. And for them, the same question remains: How did they end up investing in Wirecard shares in Germany, as if the shares of the stock exchange in Romania, which bring the highest dividends in the world, had run out?
With the Wirecard issue in mind, ZF recommended ASF to consider two proposals that would help the Pillar II pension market to be more prudent:
1. Pillar II pension funds must submit quarterly reports, not semi-annual. The explanation that these investments made, if disclosed quarterly, would influence the market, does not hold up.
2. That the Pillar II pension funds add two more columns to their reports: a column in which, for each exposure, they publish the profit or loss; and the second column – for each exposure marked to publish the realized profit or loss.
I hope ASF is still analyzing these proposals and has not closed them in a drawer.
Not in vain, but the money that is collected in Pillar II – already in September it is 75,000 million lei, that is, more than 15,000 million euros – is becoming more and more and there will be more and more “recommendations” for irrefutable investments.
[ad_2]
