Wirecard was a bit of a darling of finance in Germany, a national pride. This Internet payment service, which first specialized in pornographic and online gaming sites, has grown to become a sort of European competitor of Paypal or Western Union. Today, it has 6000 employees and 26 branches worldwide.

Listed on the stock market, Wirecard made its debut in 2018 in the Dax, the equivalent of the CAC 40. The company also replaced Commerzbank. A symbol: the young shoot taking the place of the old German banking institution ... It is valued up to 28 billion euros. But in a few weeks everything collapses. Today, it is worth only 2 billion. And its survival is at stake.

At the origin of this scandal, an internal audit. The group admits not being able to justify a hole of nearly 2 billion euros, or a quarter of its financial balance sheet, in its accounts. Money that should have been in banks in the Philippines which turns out to be false. In reality, the sum would never have existed! This is what management indicates in a press release.

Worse, it would not be an isolated case. Doubts hang over the accounts of the years 2016, 2017 and 2018. We are here faced with a real financial thriller which is reminiscent of the Enron affair, this Texan company, which in the early 2000s also artificially inflated profits and masked its losses. She ended up going bankrupt in 2001.

This time, the affair damages the image of Germany, its seriousness, that of Dax and that of the German financial gendarme, the BaFin who finds himself humiliated. Her boss talks about a complete disaster. Especially since the press, and in particular the Financial Times, had not stopped expressing doubts about this group, with investigations and whistleblowers, for several years. Without ever having been heard ...

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