Germany's biggest postwar financial scandal | DW Documentary

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Der Cum-Ex-Scandal mit ca. 30 Milliarden Schaden ist kleiner? Faszinierend

👍︎︎ 21 👤︎︎ u/Leopard1A5 📅︎︎ Apr 26 2021 🗫︎ replies

Bisher größte

👍︎︎ 6 👤︎︎ u/drivemusicnow 📅︎︎ Apr 25 2021 🗫︎ replies

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?

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/backintheddr 📅︎︎ Apr 26 2021 🗫︎ replies
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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.
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Channel: DW Documentary
Views: 425,116
Rating: 4.8645835 out of 5
Keywords: Documentary, Documentaries, documentaries, DW documentary, full documentary, DW, documentary 2021, documentary, Wirecard, short seller, BaFin, financial markets, scandal, fraud, Jan Marsalek, finance, financial scandal, wirecard scandal, money
Id: RbJKBWl7aqg
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 42min 26sec (2546 seconds)
Published: Sun Apr 25 2021
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