A new scandal is raging in German capitalism ... After the Volkswagen Dieselgate, the Wirecard financial scandal. It could be the biggest recent financial fraud, recalling the Enron scandal in the United States: the German company Wirecard admitted on Monday that a sum of 1.9 billion euros, although registered in its balance sheet, "most likely" did not exist.
It is a huge financial scandal that is shaking Germany, with the fraudulent collapse of a star of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange ...
We compare this case to the bankruptcy of Enron in the United States in the early 2000s or to Volkswagen's Dieselgate: this time, it is a star of German finance that is involved. A company with a little known name, Wirecard, but which plays an essential role since its job is to manage online payments for more than 300,000 companies worldwide and to ensure that when you buy things online, the merchant is well paid. Wirecard started in online games and porn before becoming a giant in electronic payments. A giant that was worth 24 billion euros not long ago on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and which is almost worth nothing today ...
It is worth nothing because we discovered a gigantic fraud ...
Yes, and this is where the case is embarrassing because neither the audit firm EY, supposed to control the accounts, nor the gendarme of the Stock Exchange saw anything. "It's unheard of, it's a shame," said the president of the German supervisory authority. The investigators discovered that a sum of 1.9 billion euros entered in Wirecard's accounts ... did not exist! These funds were supposed to belong to banks based in the Philippines. In reality, it was a decoy, a fraudulent writing. A priori, no individual would be injured in the case. But after the discovery last year of embezzlement at Deutsche Bank, this new scandal tarnishes a little more the image of German finance.