Wirecard’s former chief executive Markus Braun is in custody on accusations of running a criminal enterprise that defrauded creditors of €3.2 billion. Here's everything you need to get caught up about the payment company and its downfall:
The German Bundestag decided on Tuesday to launch a full inquiry into the downfall of payment company Wirecard, which filed for insolvency in June after €1.9 billion in cash were found to be missing from its accounts. Lawmakers want to probe possible government failures to uncover the scandal even as evidence accumulated over the last year.
- Wirecard’s former chief executive Markus Braun is in custody on accusations of running a criminal enterprise that defrauded creditors of €3.2 billion. Braun and other Wirecard executives deny any wrongdoing. The company’s former chief operating officer, Jan Marsalek, has fled Germany and his whereabouts is unknown.
- Both finance minister Olaf Scholz and Germany’s top financial regulator, BaFin, have been accused of turning a blind eye to Wirecard’s problems, first reported by the Financial Times in January, 2019, because the company was seen as a German fintech success story. BaFin even originally filed criminal complaints against the journalists who first uncovered the fraud.
The outlook: The inquiry could prove embarrassing for the two ruling coalition parties, Merkel’s conservative CDU and Scholz’s social-democratic SPD, one year before the general election scheduled in the fall of 2021. But the impact on the political careers of both parties’ leaders won’t be the same: Merkel is retiring next year, whereas Scholz will be running as his party’s candidate for the chancellor job.
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