“the longing for a digital national champion”

March 6, 2023 5:47 PM

How the Biggest Fraud in German History Unravelled A wild tale of state-corporate collusion in Germany's Fintech industry: The tech company Wirecard was embraced by the German élite. But a reporter discovered that behind the façade of innovation were lies and links to Russian intelligence. Come for some standard finance shenanigans, stay for the inappropriate use of state power against journalism. (ungated)
posted by cendawanita (24 comments total)

Come for some standard finance shenanigans, stay for the inappropriate use of state power against journalism

I'm just saying, as a Malaysian with our 1MDB scandal that got uncovered with journos such as those from WSJ, damn, we have to take notes from the Germans, these are some choice accusations. /s
posted by cendawanita at 5:51 PM on March 6, 2023 [13 favorites]

The LRB bracketed Wirecard with the VW scandal and the review is written by one of my favourite writers on matters financial, John Lanchester.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n15/john-lanchester/fraudpocalypse
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 6:16 PM on March 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Yeah, that London Review of Book longform article about VW's Dieselgate and the Wirecard fraud is worth linking up: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n15/john-lanchester/fraudpocalypse
posted by intermod at 6:24 PM on March 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

This is a fun story, and I can’t help but note that the reporter’s book is suddenly showing up on local library wait lists. Good job, agent.
posted by Going To Maine at 6:46 PM on March 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

There's a netflix doc
posted by brujita at 7:42 PM on March 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Espionage fiction is often criticized for unrealistically complicated plotting, but the New Yorker piece shows that the most elaborate fictions are at least an order of magnitude too simplified to achieve one to one correspondence with reality.
posted by jamjam at 8:46 PM on March 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

For those wondering about "élite", the term of at is accent aigu, and you will not find a satisfactory reason that they use it (the diaeresis aka New Yorker umlaut lets readers know that the second vowel is in a different syllable, and is actually helpful for people who have read words but never heard them pronounced)
posted by I paid money to offer this... insight? at 8:50 PM on March 6, 2023

Scholz had to have known.
posted by hypnogogue at 10:47 PM on March 6, 2023

Read this last night and gasped, was going to post but it got too late. Anyway, that was the thing that got me at the end too on Scholz, the hanging implication that this scandal goes further and deeper still than even revealed here.
posted by blue shadows at 11:10 PM on March 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

The Lanchester article, ungated

I read the McCrum book, which was OK if kind of workmanlike, given the extraordinary tale he's elling. The Netflix doc seemed slapped together and altogether shoddy. The Wirecard scandal itself, well, surely there is something still missing in the recounting. These things always look totally obvious after they are revealed; the best scammers are like close-up magicians, fooling you constantly and way out ahead of you on the big picture. But these guys got cover and clearly Germany's ire at not having national champion tech companies plus simmering humiliation over the wobbling of the financial sector (Commerzbank & Deutsche Bank, among others) meant they were ripe to get taken.
posted by chavenet at 2:51 AM on March 7, 2023

Perhaps they are continuing to pretend that élite is French, but in that case the editors must be slipping, since such a foreign usage ought to be italicized for proper stuffiness.
posted by mubba at 3:50 AM on March 7, 2023 [7 favorites]

Touché, mubba.
posted by wenestvedt at 4:07 AM on March 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Élite is always the snobby cultural sense, from my understanding; elite can have more general implications of high-level competition. There are elite athletes in most any sport, but an élite athlete is on the Yale squash team.
posted by Jon_Evil at 7:39 AM on March 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

kind of workmanlike, given the extraordinary tale he's telling

I had the same feeling, but I suspect that the text has been lawyered to death. There's a note at the end of the book that says, "Markus Braun himself maintained his innocence and rejected the version of events presented in this book. His lawyer said that ‘the allegations/insinuations contained or suggested in your questions are wholly or substantially incorrect and untrue’." With Braun's lawyer hinting at a libel suit, it's wise for McCrum to be very careful about what he commits to paper.
posted by cyanistes at 7:42 AM on March 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

archimagirus osculum, wenestvedt
posted by elkevelvet at 8:47 AM on March 7, 2023

I saw a tweet the other day from 2021 that drew the line all the way to back to a desi mom who was unhappy about her son being forced to resign starting it all.

It's amazing who long large conspiracies can operate with the collusion of hundreds of people and then are eventually tripped up by the smallest things. Like if they had transferred Pav Gill out of the way and given him a nice juicy raise would Wirecard have been able to keep cruising along?
posted by srboisvert at 9:07 AM on March 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm just saying, as a Malaysian with our 1MDB scandal that got uncovered with journos such as those from WSJ, damn, we have to take notes from the Germans, these are some choice accusations. /s

The 1MDB is so awesome they stole money to fund the Wolf of Wall Street with Leo DiCaprio celebrating financial fraud with a knowing wink and smirk tippling liquor and smoking a cigar. That's some pretty incredible fraud brass right there. The germans just tried to steal money and keep in on the down low. I'm not sure any fraud can ever top the big pimpin of the 1MDB fraud. Even SBF's bahamian house party cuddle puddle/effective altruism schtick seems like made for tv by comparison.
posted by srboisvert at 9:16 AM on March 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

elkvelvet: archimagirus osculum

Uh..."kiss the cook"?
posted by wenestvedt at 9:25 AM on March 7, 2023

would Wirecard have been able to keep cruising along?

Inevitably the off-shore "assets" would have had to grow and grow to meet Wirecard's revenue forecasts, attracting more attention from suspicious analysts and external auditors (Ernst & Young), and requiring more and more detailed evidence in order to persuade E&Y to approve the accounts.

According to McCrum, in the mid-2010s the Wirecard balance sheet showed "assets" held by multiple off-shore partners in Dubai, India, Singapore and the Philippines, but by 2020 the auditors had looked under most of these shells, backing Wirecard into claiming that they had consolidated all these "assets" in accounts at two banks in the Philippines. McCrum wrote,

Finally, a senior Ernst & Young executive placed calls directly to the CEOs of the two banks. The first formal response arrived from BPI late on Tuesday, 16 June [2020]. ‘Please be informed that the attached documents are spurious’ ... On Thursday a similar letter arrived from the second Manila bank, BDO, which said the signatures of its staff were forged and the accounts were not real, also calling them ‘spurious’.

posted by cyanistes at 9:32 AM on March 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Uh..."kiss the cook"?

that is the best I could get out of Google translate for "chef's kiss"

elite, touche.. that is what I'm here for
posted by elkevelvet at 9:46 AM on March 7, 2023

Reading this story made me think of an episode of Peep Show where Mark (David Mitchell) pretends to be a new student at University to try to woo a woman he met:

"Is that it? Is that how easy it is to steal some education money? Bloody hell, who's in charge? The world's just people walking around, going in to rooms and saying things. It's all a big swizzle!"
posted by Saxon Kane at 10:03 AM on March 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

chef's kiss = "osculum coqui", but that's not idiomatic in Latin: you want something like "praestantissimum" (most excellent).
posted by cyanistes at 10:22 AM on March 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

“The worst part was that I had my socks all the way up,” Gold, who is now sober, said. “You don’t want to be seen fucking with white socks up at my age.”
posted by medusa at 2:26 PM on March 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yeah, the most interesting person in this whole story to me was Paul Murphy, the FT Alphaville guy. Marsalek, pfft, guy with delusions of James Bond derring do. Braun, wanted to get rich and didn't care how. McCrum, dogged reporter. Gold, liked his coke and his gambles. Murphy?! Wanted to mix with people on the wrong side of the line by calling them 'sources', commit a bit of light sexual harassment at work ('young, blonde, female reporter'), and send shockwaves through the finance industry. I'm genuinely surprised FT doesn't seem him as the liability he seems to be.
posted by librarylis at 10:57 AM on March 11, 2023