Ladies and gentlemen, I would
like to issue the following statement on behalf of the
board of Wirecard. I think I watched the video, I
think I've watched it 120 times. It cannot currently be ruled out that Wirecard may have been
the victim of fraud on a grand scale. You knew these guys were done. Thank you. I just laughed. I was happy. Wirecard shares are crashing. DAX-listed Wirecard is sinking
in a torrent of fraud allegations. Shares in payment services
provider Wirecard tumbled... It's a mixture of crime, drama and
action film in this Munich suburb. It was like being
punched in the stomach. It was like finding out
after 30 years of marriage that youíve been
cheated on for 20 years. The champagne arrived and I
made more money on Wirecard than I could ever imagine. Well, I felt on top of the
world. Iíve never been so happy. I had to fill myself up with beer
so I could sleep. It's a disaster. This was terrible news for Germanyís
financial sector and for the investors. Wirecard is proof that
nothing in life is impossible; the unthinkable can happen. My name is Peter Herold. I am the actual inventor
and founder of Wirecard. It's basically my brainchild. It came to me in 1997 as I was sitting
on my couch with a glass of wine, and asking myself, ìWhatís the next big
thing?" And then I started thinking: In payment transactions, there is
always a customer and a vendor. They donít know
or trust each other. And my idea at the time was
to create a trusted mediator to ensure that the payment is processed
and also that the product is delivered. That was the idea for Wirecard. But I soon realized that
if I wanted it to go big, I definitely needed external investors.
So I started looking for some. In 2001, there were 60
employees at Wirecard. And, it fills you with a certain pride,
like watching your child grow up. The company was looking
for a technical director. Back then, a certain
Mr. Marsalek applied, and at the interview he made an
open, sophisticated impression, with typical Viennese humor. He was extremely friendly
with a great presence. What I kind of
wondered at the time, seeing this 19 year-old with
no high school diploma, was: Is all this stuff heís
saying really credible? A key figure has disappeared in the multi-billion dollar
Wirecard accounting scandal. Fugitive Wirecard board
member Jan Marsalek may be in Belarus
according to media reports. In the Philippines, corrupt officials helped cover up
former board member Marsalekís tracks. So my name is Mark Cohodes. Some people would say Iím
retired, but Iím a restless soul. So, I do a number of things. One
is I raise chickens. I also grow fruit. But most people know
me for shorting stocks, finding and rooting out corporate fraud
and exposing rascals in the marketplace, both in the United States and abroad.
Well, people donít like short sellers. Itís not just a German thing. I myself am hated in Canada.
I was hated in Brussels. Well, short selling is a
part of financial markets. And we have the possibility to restrict
it at times when that makes sense. It often involves very
profit-oriented speculation, but that doesnít make it
completely unreasonable. When I started working
at Wirecard in 2003, there was a relatively
small number of employees. The companyís core business was
payment processing, like today. Once online payments
got started, of course, the areas of pornography and
online?gaming really took off, and Wirecardís main
business was in those areas. In 2003, I had a second job
interview with Markus Braun, in which I was asked
whether I would have problems dealing with adult
entertainment content. A short introduction to myself:
I am the CEO of Wirecard. Since ten years Wirecard is the leading
online payment processing company. Dr. Braun came from a renowned
management consultancy. Accordingly he was quite standoffish,
and even after Wirecard was sold, he switched to the board of directors
and continued running the new Wirecard. Last night we arrested
Dr. Markus Braun, and we are now investigating
suspicions of false statements and market manipulation. He always seemed like he was
two floors above everyone else, with big visions and ideas that
tended to surpass everyday normality. I really think that one of our most
beautiful elements as mankind is that we can think abstract and that we can think about
the better way to do things. For me personally, Wirecard
was like a second family. From the start, it felt
a bit megalomaniac, ... ...that he wanted to take
this company onto the DAX. So if you start your base
business doing payment processing for porn and/or gambling,
it shows the world that you have no
boundaries of doing things. And as you grow,
you get a stock price. Then you can wrap a
label around it like fintech. I could have a white horse and
paint black stripes on the horse. Thatís just a white horse with
black stripes. Itís not a zebra. Right? And I could go and sell the horse as a
zebra and I could say this is a zebra - hey, all this is, is a white
horse with black stripes. Jan Marsalek and Markus Braun had a teacher-pupil kind of
relationship right from the beginning. And Mr. Marsalek had a lot of technical
savvy and knew what was going on. I think they complemented each other
very well on the path the company took. Mr. Marsalek was a very
friendly, approachable person. He was often happy to
chat with the employees. I knew he was there and that he
was responsible for the Asia business, but that was all. Jan Marsalek probably led
at least three lives at once: He was on the Wirecard board and
had to make a serious impression. And he was responsible
for the Asia business, where he was probably the driving force
behind the accounting manipulation. And then there was the third Marsalek.
He boasted about being a secret agent, but it was probably
more than just bragging. My nameís Fraser Perring
and Iím a short seller. I expose companies that
have irregular accounts, unknown issues and where
they donít disclose all the problems or all the elements of the business
to the investors or the public. We basically bet on the
share price going down. If weíre wrong, it costs
us a lot of money. A lot. You know, you arenít betting two
pounds on Wirecard going down. Youíre betting millions. I hadnít heard of Wirecard until July,
August - I canít remember exactly - 2015. And then someone said:
Their Asian operations are expanding, and we donít know why. And
you get curious, donít you? With Wirecard we spent
thousands of hours researching it. So, we published a
damning exposÈ - 101 pages. We called it Zatarra
Research and Investigations. Oh, it was a
complete fraud bomb. People said that we used
the word ìfraudî too much. In hindsight I donít think so. We
didnít use the word ìcriminalsî enough. And it was bang on. Our target price for this stock
was a complete and utter zero. You canít go lower. It was a complete
donut, a zero. It was worthless. Like with India. So, a company
has been for sale for two years. GI Retail, for two years. So, GI retail
did travel, tourism, and e-commerce. The price has come down from
70 million to 50 million to 40 million to 30 million. It was for sale and an
intermediary of Wirecard bought it. And then they sold it to Wirecard
and Wirecard paid 340 million. There was just no way in the
world I could get in my head why you would even
buy the business. It looks like Wirecard had
long not been profitable in its core business in Europe,
but had been losing money, and that they covered it up
through manipulated accounting. The assumption is that it
began with acquisitions in Asia... For instance, a payment service provider in
India with not much behind it. And you started
looking at the accounts. Three hundred and forty million for
a company that barely made a dime? They presented these
investments as very valuable; they cooked their books through
acquisitions of Asian companies nobody had ever heard of here. It was the biggest indicator that
if you canít add up 340 million, what else is really there? This pattern of acquisitions
continued through the entire story. There was then a bigger takeover where
they bought a package of companies from India and Singapore. The
payment flowed to a fund in Mauritius, and it is unclear to this
day who was behind it. So there's reason to suspect that
money might have been misappropriated by people with
connections to Wirecard. I thought there was
an adult in BaFin that would actually pick the
report up and go through - OK, itís very dramatic,
if you want to call it that. Forget the drama, I am going
to sit down and test the facts. The tone of the report was
perhaps sometimes a bit shrill or not every bit of information was
100?percent soundly researched. But the core of the
story was correct. What happened? Nothing.
Oh, no. They persecuted me. Market manipulation. What
was manipulating the market? A criticism was, why did
you do it anonymously? Hello? We donít want
to die. Oh, thatís absurd. What sort of company
would follow its employees, follow critics, break into them. Three and a half years later Iíve
got phone calls from journalists going, ìHoly smoke, Fraser. You
were followed for weeks. Itís in the FT.î Oh, shit. I know that.
Theyíve got pictures of me in the FT where theyíve been
following me for weeks. A team run by the former
intelligence officer of Libya. We were getting cyber-attacked, hacked.
Iím a bloody short seller, not a spy. Iím Stefano Musolino and I work in
Reggio Calabria as a deputy prosecutor. The Gambling operation
was very complex. I think about a thousand raids
were carried out in gambling halls and betting offices
all across Italy. The investigation revealed
that the SKS365 betting office had collaborated with organized
crime in various regions. They worked with
the Mafia in Sicily, with Ndrangheta in Calabria,
and Sacra Corona Unita in Apulia. The system of SKS was money-laundering.
It was about injecting profits from criminal business
into the normal economy. Wirecard was one of the banks
used by criminal organizations to deposit the profits that they had
made through their illegal business. It did not surprise me at all when reporting came out of
Wirecardís usefulness to the Mafia. My name is Fahmi Kadir and Iím a
hedge fund manager here in New York. I run Safkhet Capital Management,
which is a short-only hedge fund. Our firm is named after the
ancient Egyptian goddess Safkhet. Safkhet was the goddess of knowledge,
mathematics, accounting, wisdom, which all seem very perfect. I love short selling and thatís
how I want to make money. Well, back in 2017, we were
preparing to launch in January and we wanted to have a
good pipeline, a healthy pipeline of various short positions where we
have conviction the price will go down. Our belief and every
piece of evidence that we were able to collect
over the last almost three years pointed towards Wirecard being
a massive digital laundromat. While companies like Wirecard are
at the forefront of digital business, traditional banks
are lagging behind. Commerzbank now fears losing its spot
on the DAX due to its low stock value, and Wirecard
might take its place. Let me let me say,
of course, objectively, itís a milestone to
become part of the DAX 30. Wirecard is valued at over 20 billion
euros. With less than 5,000 employees, the company has achieved
gigantic stock market value. Our ambition is now to become
the biggest DAX company. Iím Werner Tietjen, and I bought
520 shares, equivalent to 72,000 euros. Iím 67 years old, and Iíve
gone to sea for 38 years. ... and Iíve spent most
of my life basically at sea. I had saved up some
money during that time and I didnít want to simply leave it in
the bank, so I invested it in Wirecard. I felt that with those 70,000 euros I
really had something. It was security - so that I wouldnít have to watch
every euro. It was a great feeling. We knew it was such a sensitive
story and we wanted to get it right. We waited more than three months
before we finally pulled the trigger. My name is Lionel Barber. I was the Chefredakteur of the
Financial Times between 2005 and 2020. We got a tip that in Singapore there was an investigation
internally into whether Wirecard, people in Wirecard, were
inflating their numbers. So we went to Singapore. We talked to
whistleblowers, who gave us documents. All that was in
January, February 2019. Wirecard was the biggest
story that Iíve ever done. According to a report by British
newspaper Financial Times, the shares recently hit
quite some turbulence. Germany's financial services
regulator, BaFin, has been conducting routine investigations
due to the enormous fluctuations. BaFin never asked
to talk to the reporters. They never asked to see
any of our material. Nothing. Then we read in the newspapers that
BaFin had opened a criminal complaint against two of our
reporters for doing their job. Now, it is true that some short
sellers bet against the stock. But that is not illegal.
What I don ët understand is how BaFin thought that we
were conspiring with these people? I have literally no idea what
BaFin thought they were doing. There was also an
unprecedented ban on short selling. The financial regulator is
investigating whether speculators who make money through falling
prices are targeting Wirecard. BaFin has now banned short
selling with Wirecard shares. BaFinís reaction really served
as confirmation for the employees that all these rumors
must be unfounded. BaFin reinforced my belief
that everything was just fine. I was driving back from
Santa Barbara with my wife when it happened and I
actually couldnít believe something like that would happen.
Iíve been doing this for five decades, and in all my years, Iíve never seen a single stock
short-sell ban imposed by a regulator. I thought it was beyond strange - and
a sign that things were terribly wrong. We needed to defend ourselves and potentially convince
BaFin to remove the ban. And then the other issue was
that part of Wirecardís success was it painted hedge fund
managers and short sellers as we were the criminals and we were
just these anonymous unknown figures with moving lots of money. I
thought that because of that, it made sense for us to
put a face to the short sellers and to say we believe that this is
potentially a money laundering scheme. So our first interaction
was, of course, the public letter we had published to
BaFin regarding the short selling ban. Interestingly, just a few weeks after
I had submitted that letter to BaFin, I was going to be in Germany
and I offered to meet with BaFin in a confidential setting
to share the information and to be a resource to them. And
they, of course, refused the meeting. For years, we only ever heard that
BaFin was acting against journalists and short sellers. But,
at least until June 2020, we never heard that BaFin was
also looking into other matters, for instance potential market
manipulation by Wirecard. The order was in fact given to
also examine Wirecardís accounts in light of this press coverage. The public didnít
hear about this, because they probably wanted to
prevent any details from escaping that would harm the
companyís reputation. There is a whole range of rules restricting public reporting in
order to protect market confidence. BaFin actually misled the
market through its behavior, allowing Wirecard to
keep acquiring money. This meant the fraudsters had one
more year to loot the sinking ship. They raked up another billion
that has now ended up somewhere. We were terribly concerned that
Wirecard was trying to infiltrate us. Dan McCrum in particular,
who is the lead reporter, was sure that his
email had been hacked. He also thought that he
was under surveillance. We discovered an individual
hiding under the bridge with a highly sophisticated sound
equipment camera focused on my office. So we took extraordinary, careful measures to insulate Dan
McCrum to keep our information, our secret documents
very, very watertight. So the next piece in the
puzzle was to investigate who these third parties were
that Wirecard was dealing with. We knew from our information
that a lot of the revenues and profits was
derived from them. And they had some funny names,
Cunpay, Al Alam and things like that. Wirecard said: We need these
companies, for instance, because we lack the license to make certain
payments in those particular countries. And thatís why
weíre buying them; because they have a license, and
theyíre anchored in the local market. Together with them, Wirecard obviously
managed to simply fake revenues. These partner companies played
along in the manipulated accounting. And one of the places we
went to was the Philippines. We actually went to the place where
this company was supposedly registered. And we found an old seaman. He
didnít know anything about Wirecard. We went to another address
and it was a bus company. We view this as capital
market speculation, just like previous articles. We feel we
can leave the whole issue behind us now and focus on a very strong 2019. The really surprising thing is that
this mode of operation involving ongoing denials kept working and
a lot of people never thought to say, ìLetís take a
close look at this.î Ernst & Young was Wirecard's
official auditor at the time. They should have noticed. We wrote a letter to their auditors,
E&Y, highlighting a lot of stuff that the Financial Times came up
with and some basic accounting things why this thing should be looked
at, that the numbers make no sense, that the cash isnít the cash. Wirecard never really
gave a good explanation of why they needed escrow
accounts. And for, to have billions, over a billion dollars, in an escrow
account is very, very suspicious to us. What did Wirecard claim it
needed this trust account for? Because it was supposed to hold
money that belonged to Wirecard and Wirecard needed it as a
safeguard for business partners in Asia with which Wirecard was
allegedly processing payments. So it was up to Ernst & Young to
check whether the money Wirecard claimed to have in an escrow
account in Singapore A) really existed and B)
really belonged to Wirecard. I basically feel like any
other citizen of this country; I really canít understand how
that went unseen in the audit that was performed regularly and
normally by the auditing company. I said, we are going to write the
biggest, hardest, toughest story, where they will have to
admit that theyíre lying and that their stories are fake
and their revenues are fake. We published this article and they
could not they could not get out of it. We also published -
very unusual - internal, huge documents to show that
our documents were not fake. And as a result of that,
the ice finally melted. There, you could read how
Wirecard cooked the books. And it was quite sophisticated
and difficult to grasp. And so unfortunately, it was
an intelligent model for cheating, which is unfortunately
why it worked for so long. We were convinced that
eventually Wirecard would collapse. What was extraordinary
is it took so long, because the company fought
like a like a rat in a corner. Under much pressure from shareholders
of Wirecard, Wirecard hired KPMG, a big four accounting firm, to investigate all of the allegations
that the Financial Times had raised. I personally viewed the KPMG
report they commissioned as a way of Wirecard saying,
ìWeíre going to prove once and for all that all these insinuations
are completely baseless.î So, the KPMG report validated all of
the opinions that critics of Wirecard and journalists all had, and that
was that itís impossible to solve. Frauds always look for an end game.
Whatís the end game here: how do we, how does Markus Braun go to be a
captain of industry and get out of this? I just want to say Iím
also a pathologic optimist. You have to sell the
company or merge the fraud into something so
big and so robust. I mean, hell, up until the end,
they were talking about merging or buying out or doing
something with Deutsche Bank. That sounded very concrete, because Deutsche Bank was struggling
and had problems, And of course, Wirecardís idea was to
prop up this theater of illusion and perhaps also fulfill
the politicians' dreams of a major German
financial player. If they would have acquired Deutsche
Bank, or Deutsche Bank acquired them, or they merged, they would
have accomplished the ultimate, and that is become
something legit. And then they would
have written everything off and gone off into the sunset
as part of Deutsche Bank. There have been cases in the
past when fast-growing companies with high stock market values have taken over well-performing
traditional companies. Sometimes it went well, and
sometimes it didnít. In this case, Iím very glad this speculation
didnít actually come to fruition. When KPMG did
their investigation, they flagged the issue of
escrow accounts and at that time, Wirecard provided
no documentation. The transfer of the
alleged escrow accounts from Singapore to Mr. Tolentino in
the Philippines happened at a time when KPMG was already
conducting a special audit intended to investigate precisely this Asia
business and the escrow accounts. Mr. Tolentino was a lawyer who had mainly dealt with
divorce and custody disputes. So there was no apparent
reason to entrust 1.9 billion euros to a single lawyer
like him as a trustee. I think they switched
trustees out of panic, because they knew they
were really cornered now. The point had been discovered where
there really was manipulation going on. To be legally compliant, Wirecard had
to submit an annual financial statement for 2019 approved by their
auditor by the end of June 2020. During the month of
June, it became clear that either they'd
get the signature now or Ernst & Young would get serious
and say, weíre not signing for 2019. And for a publicly traded company
thatís basically a death sentence. When you see what Jan Marsalek said
and did, it all seems incredibly naive. And I donít buy it. I think he
wrote those emails to buy time, to prepare his exit
plan and disappearance, and to pretend that
everything was still fine, because there were people at his
throat saying we need documents now. (Currently,) 1.9 billion
euros are unaccounted for. ...and are said to be in escrow
accounts in Asian banks. Auditors had doubts
about documents regarding 1.9 billion
euros in escrow accounts. After the management board
admitted that the 1.9 billion euros missing from their books
probably never existed, the share has been in free fall. There are charges of organized fraud,
embezzlement, incorrect statements, and market manipulation
in numerous cases. When I think of Markus Braun
and Jan Marsalek, I feel very torn. If I had the chance, I would
definitely ask them: Why? Iíd just like to know the truth. I deserve to, after all this time
and dedication devoted to Wirecard. I was sitting out there in the
garden and I thought, ìItís all over.î Itís like having the rug
pulled out from under you. You fall into a deep hole mentally.
You donít even know when it will end - you just keep falling. You donít know
how youíll manage to get out again. Then I had the lucky idea of
asking the shipping company again. I knew the boss of the
company. I said: Heiko. Iím sorry, but I have a real
problem. Iím broke, and I need a job - can you give me one? I fell on my face
with Wirecard and lost 70,000 euros, and I have nothing left. Wirecard is a financial scandal
that must be investigated, but appropriate action
also needs to be taken now. If nothing changes, it will
just have been a bad scandal, and the real scandal will be our
failure to grasp this opportunity to implement the
necessary reforms. Wirecard is not the first
German financial scandal. I donít have much faith in
Olaf and I donít have much faith perhaps in the politicians who are
now suddenly up in arms about Wirecard. I hope that the public forces these
politicians to take necessary actions and, further, to hold
them all accountable. Iím about to turn 68 and Iíll have to keep going to
sea to compensate for this loss. As far as I can see, the
politicians have failed completely.
Der Cum-Ex-Scandal mit ca. 30 Milliarden Schaden ist kleiner? Faszinierend
Bisher größte
Es gab auch in der letzten Zeit dieser Fall https://www.rte.ie/news/primetime/2021/0422/1211425-irish-investors-dolphin-trust-german-pyramid-scheme/
Ich finde nur wenige deutschsprachige Infos dazu. Ist das Korruption oder waren die Investoren naiv?