Money Men: A Hot Startup, A Billion Dollar Fraud, A Fight for the Truth

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A sceptical reader couldn’t help but wonder if the wilful ignorance towards Wirecard’s flagrant fraud was partially born from the EUs tragic desperation for a home-grown technology MNC. A woeful state of affairs if political élites’ contemporary aspirations involve nurturing an overvalued tech company of questionable social utility. I also really liked to learn more about the colourful characters who are living their lives as professional short sellers. Again and again I pushed these feelings and thoughts away, as my attention became more focused on what the files revealed.

It is a world of private clubs and exclusive vacation properties where gossip is the coin of the realm. He was also awarded the Ludwig Erhard Prize for economic journalism, a Reporters Forum Reporterpreis and a special award by the Helmut Schmidt prize jury for investigative journalism.

There's a cat and mouse game between the company and McCrum that ought to be exciting, but by describing the hundreds of other cats and mice all playing small (or unknown) roles, it feels like reading a company's annual report. Later in life, too, I would come to understand how fear and insecurity and clinging to worldly possessions can become a driving force in one’s life. Somewhere in my youth I had read the story of Sir Edward Marshall, and was deeply moved and inspired. In reality, though, many of their smaller collaborators either didn't exist at all, or were just mailboxes that received bills for millions, that were never actually paid. The Money Man is a story of determination, love, and faith that includes many page turning stories of extraordinary success and dismal failure.

They’re confronted with opposition from enamoured government regulators, organised crime leg-breakers, morals-for-hire corporate law firms, chummy “auditors”, and unscrupulous private espionage firms. Money Men is a business book paced as a thriller, in which the reporter is also the protagonist and the story seems unbelievable, even though you know it's true. Yet for a long time, the company was able to brush off allegations of audacious accounting fraud, shifting the blame instead onto Financial Times reporters, like McCrum, who were claimed to have facilitated market manipulation in collusion with short sellers. She put down her spatula – she was always stirring something – turned from the stove and looked at me. This brilliant account of the company’s downfall is a riveting read and worthy of a spy thriller, bringing all the disparate pieces together.

Olaf Scholz, Chancellor of Germany, awarding the Reporters Forum Reporterpreis You may also be interested in. The payment processing architecture heavyweights (Visa and Mastercard) unquestionably process astronomical transaction volumes. I can't help comparing Money Men to Bad Blood, the story of the Theranos scandal by Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou. And given the state of his overall health now, it was highly unlikely he would be able to operate at full strength for a long time — if ever.

Then I was on my way from Streatham in South London to Ewell East in Surrey, 15 miles from our home, where my grandparents lived. Something about him always drew me, though he was often the quietest one in the melee that was our family. Dan McCrum and his colleagues at the FT deserve medals for their tenacious battle to expose the dark heart of Wirecard - the enormous fraud and money laundering machine with shadowy ties.The German regulators and the German journalistic and finance community tried so hard to protect their unicorn, in a mix of arrogance with incompetence, that they failed to see the problem with it: it was indeed a mythical creature that doesn't exist. I had turned my attention to the incredible spread of food, dishing as much onto my plate as it would hold – besides roast beef, potatoes and onions, there was gefilte fish, chopped liver, matzo ball soup, pickled herring….