I could make this a epic piece of 20-odd pages, but I'll make this simple and to forty lines.
Wirecard was a business banking situation....created about 20 years ago in Germany. It's main purpose? Electronic payments. It was built to be an alternate to credit cards and regular banking transfers. Headquartered in Germany, at Aschheim (suburb of NE Munich).
On the books, they had around 5,000 employees total.
At some point, around five to six years ago, they started to offer help to Chinese folks....who were visiting Europe....to transfer cash/capital in for their trip or extended stay. Last year, they acquired a major Chinese money-transfer company....to be a part of their inside-China plan.
Around the summer of 2008....accusations came up and the first round of problems were noted. An audit occurred. It's safe to say that some of the issues were cleaned up, and some success was made in getting the company back to a functional standard.
About every two years after that....some significant problem was noted, and 'cleaning up' was a on-going process, with stock prices rising and falling constantly. As much as they were cleaning....every year or two....fresh problems were being discovered.
In the fall of last year....stock manipulation was noted by FT.
In the past week, another audit was done. This time, the audit basically said that around 1.9-billion Euro is simply not existing. Yesterday, the company came to agree...yes, the 1.9-billion Euro doesn't exist (maybe it never existed in the first place).
All of this leading back to stock manipulation? Well, yeah....that's the big issue. Was this all leading to money-laundering? A fair number of business analysts are suggesting that from day one.....to today....this was mostly a contraption to move hidden money from one site to another. Some might even suggest that the CEO and board were hidden from that view, and never grasped the full impact.
All of this leads to a news item which few Germans can readily understand. Didn't the German government monitor things like this, and have professional people to prevent money-laundering? And if the 1.9-billion doesn't exist....how many other fake companies exist.....with billions on the books but it's non-existent?
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