A financial scandal threatens the reputation of German finance, which has survived the many injuries of Deutsche Bank. But this time the reputational damage is much more serious. This morning the Munich police proceeded toarrest of Markus Braun, 60, head of Wirecard since 2002, the jewel of German Fintech, leader in electronic payment systems. The charges? False accounting and price manipulation, just to please, waiting for new, inevitable disputes that will follow after the institute has had to confess that there is no trace of 1,9 billion which, according to the financial statements presented in February (never approved), should be deposited, in the name of Wirecard, with two banks in the Philippines: BDO Unibank and the Philippines Islands Bank. Both institutes, with the comfort of the central bank of Manila, have maintained that they “have not never had any relationship with Wirecard”, as Felix Hufeld, the head of Bafin, the supreme body for the control of financial activities beyond the Rhine, had to ascertain, bewildered and shocked, who admitted “the complete disaster”. “It is the setback – he added – of the various activities of the controllers inside and outside the companies. Despite dozens of checks by auditors, controllers and authorities we have not been able to guarantee the truth. It's a shame".
Self-criticism certainly does the president credit. Or, at least, it would if it weren't for the fact that, up to the end, the authorities protected Wirecard by threatening journalists from the Financial Times, guilty of having started the investigation that uncovered Braun's plots and the resistible rise of Wirecard, born in 1999 to ensure online payments of pornographic sites and then climb, step by step, up to the Dax 30, the basket of blue chips alongside the most mobile names in industry and finance. In order to defend the prestige of this latest "jewel" of German capitalism in a digital version, Bafin, without verifying the disputes against Wirecard, took the City newspaper to court with the (probable) accusation of having favored sales in the open carried out by the "deep gorges".
In short, a German-style Parmalat case, but aggravated by the behavior of Consob across the Rhine, more concerned with defending the brand of a company that employs 6 thousand employees than the shareholders who in the space of three days have seen the more than 90 percent of the investment in smoke. The fall of the lesser god of Bavaria brought illustrious names into the fall; Dws, Deutsche Bank's fund management company has lost a large part of the billion invested in Fintech. Close behind is Credit Agricole, along with several financial boutiques in the City. But the list also includes BlackRock, Amundi, Vanguard and so on. Only those who, like the Sycomore fund, had found the group's governance criteria "unconvincing" survived. But several green ETFs ended up on the net: Herr Braun respected the obligation not to invest in weapons or fossil coal. In fact, he didn't invest at all.
