Dear Reader,
The Bundestag’s special committee which was set up to investigate the Wirecard fraud published its final report this week - or I should say final reports.
With the six parties unable to agree on their conclusions, we were given three separate versions - one backed by the CDU and SPD, one backed by the FDP, Greens and Linke, and yet another from the AfD.
The coalition partners have published a watered-down version that protects SPD Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, whose ministry oversees financial regulator BaFin, and CDU Economy Minister Peter Altmaier.
I’m presuming no one has actually read the AfD. That said, the committee was actually led by an AfD MdB and it has been widely praised for its diligence in piecing all the evidence together in just nine months.
The version that seems most likely to be both competent and rigorous though, is the one produced by the Greens, FDP and Die Linke.
Their report is close to 700 pages long - I’m not going to pretend to have read more than a small section of it. Nor am I an expert on the Wirecard scandal, which involved financial shenanigans that are completely foreign to me.
But the the chapter I was interested in was specifically on the actions of the German regulators.
In reading it, I realized one key reason as to why Wirecard could get away with its deception for so long: not only are these regulators unable to tell the difference between investigative journalism and market manipulation, they are blighted by a culture of buck passing and work avoidance.
Or, to put it bluntly: on the one side you have a global criminal enterprise employing the best lawyers and PR men money can buy. On the other side you have bureaucrats who refuse to use telephones.
To read the full article on the Bundestag’s Wirecard report sign up for Membership: