Wirecard was Germany’s most celebrated fintech success story — a payment processor that won a place in the prestigious DAX index and reached a peak valuation of over $28 billion — while financial journalists and short sellers spent years warning that billions in cash on its balance sheet simply did not exist. Rather than investigating Wirecard, German financial regulator BaFin turned its scrutiny on the short sellers and FT journalists raising the alarm, filing criminal complaints against them for market manipulation. In June 2020, Wirecard finally admitted that €1.9 billion in supposedly trustee-held cash was missing, its CEO Markus Braun was arrested at Munich airport, its fugitive COO Jan Marsalek disappeared and is believed to have fled to Russia, and the company collapsed into insolvency in what remains the most damaging financial scandal in post-war German history.
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