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Zusammenfassung von Money Men

Name: Money Men
Rating: 4.4 (35 reviews)
Author: Dan McCrum

Dan McCrum

A Hot Startup, A Billion Dollar Fraud, A Fight for the Truth

4.4 (35 Bewertungen)

21 Min.

Inhaltsübersicht

Money Men
in 6 Kernaussagen verstehen

Audio & Text in der Blinkist App

Kernaussage 1 von 6

What’s in it for me? The inside scoop on how tech darling, Wirecard, fooled the world.

When journalist Dan McCrum received a tip about a fishy-smelling German fintech company, it came with a warning. If he was going to poke around the €4 billion start-up, he should be cautious. Having recently started at the Financial Times, McCrum was young and ambitious. He wrote down the name Wirecard in his notepad and added a question mark.

Fast forward four years and the top brass of Wirecard were celebrating. That day, their firm had replaced Commerzbank on the DAX 30 Index, joining an elite group of Germany’s top blue-chip companies.

The German darling had become an unlikely success. Touted as Europe’s answer to PayPal, Wirecard’s growth skyrocketed. A mere month before its DAX 30 victory, Wirecard shares peaked at €191 and the company was valued at €24 billion. It claimed over 5,000 employees who processed the payments of over 250,000 merchants. And investors were gaga.

Then, one calm spring day in 2020, everything came crashing down. Wirecard tanked. A report had been released that revealed the company to be a fraud. The books had been cooked; the profits all faked.

This Blink follows key moments from Dan McCrum’s decade-long reporting on Wirecard. From the start-up’s early days to its runaway growth, we’ll swerve through a twisted world of short sellers and whistleblowers. We’ll meet the investors who failed to see the truth and the regulators who refused to look for it.

In this Blink, you’ll learn

some of the illegal and fraudulent activities Wirecard employed;
how the company kept dodging regulators; and
what key information eventually led to its downfall.

Chapter 1: Wirecard’s shady origins offer a glimpse into what is to come.

If anything, Wirecard was always a company with an outsized opinion of itself. And every “great” company has an even greater origin story. Wirecard’s humble beginnings center around three men with big ambitions and mammoth egos. And they give us a glimpse into the road ahead.

It all begins on a flight between Munich and Berlin. The year is 1997, and a 40-year-old Paul Bauer-Schlichtegroll, with his perma-tan and designer jeans, strikes up a conversation with a photographer for the American porn magazine, Hustler. And just like that, the connection is made. Bauer-Schlichtegroll is soon off to Beverly Hills to acquire the magazine’s German publishing rights.

But it doesn’t take him long to realize the real future is online porn – if there was only a way to charge for it. So, he switches gears, establishing a new company that can take direct debit payments over dial-up internet. Soon after, a competitor goes bust. He buys it for parts but keeps the name: Wirecard.

In no time, Wirecard moves into another shady internet business: online gambling. In the early 2000s, many countries were still drafting regulations for the industry, while others had already banned it. Banks preferred to avoid this gray area, refusing any payments that used the online gambling code 7995.

Not to be discouraged, Wirecard finds a way around this 4-digit problem, first by creating a third-party wallet that’s used to load funds at digital casinos. Then later, by simply swapping the 4-digit code for a different one whenever the payment is rejected.

At this point, Paul Bauer-Schlichtegroll is itching to cash out. Maybe he can see the writing on the wall. Preferring to cut corners, he avoids an expensive and scrutinizing Initial Public Offering process, or IPO, by orchestrating what’s known as a reverse takeover. Wirecard buys a defunct company for peanuts that already went through an IPO, et voilà! In 2004, Wirecard goes public, and Bauer-Schlichtegroll bows out.

Two other men become instrumental in taking this now public company into its bright future. Dr. Markus Braun is hired as CEO, a self-serious Austrian with a penchant for wearing black turtlenecks in the style of his contemporary, Steve Jobs.

The other is one of Wirecard’s earliest employees, Jan Marsalek, hired in his teens as Chief Technology Officer. Also Austrian, Marsalek is a confident go-getter who runs the IT department in the basement. The only problem is that the electronic payments system he spent years coding never worked. It was junk.

The two Austrians have to work together to find a solution and save their company.

Chapter 2: CEO Markus Braun fails to deny allegations of faking profits.

Dan McCrum searches for the bright blue sign of the Caffè Nero Express. Our Financial Times journalist takes a seat inside and waits. Eventually, a man named Leo Perry arrives in a beige cashmere jumpsuit. The London hedge fund manager is interested in McCrum’s work on Wirecard and wants to talk.

Let’s set the stage a bit for this meeting. It’s now 2014. In the past ten years, Wirecard’s share price has jumped from 4€ to 29€. It’s already listed on the TecDAX, an index of technology companies on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

Chapter 3: Wirecard goes on the offense after a damning report accuses the company of money laundering.

One morning in 2016, McCrum gets a call from a source, Fraser Perring. Perring had just finished dropping his kid off at school when he was approached and threatened by two hulking men, he explains.

McCrum immediately hangs up the phone and rushes home to check on his own wife and daughter. As soon as he arrives, he places his laptop into a drawer, resets the wifi password, and checks the locks on all the doors and windows. He sits down and tries to calm down. Wirecard is getting into his head.

Chapter 4: A whistleblower and his mother weather the storm while waiting for McCrum’s story to break.

Pav Gill gets his determination and work ethic from his mother, who raised him on her own in a tiny Singapore flat. He eventually goes to law school and gets headhunted by Wirecard’s Asia headquarters.

In his new position as legal counsel, Gill immediately finds it curious how tight money is for such a growing company. Even more curious is the man behind the numbers.

Chapter 5: Wirecard sues the Financial Times, and the German authorities investigate McCrum.

It’s a gray January day in London when someone notices an odd couple standing outside the Financial Times office. The man is wearing a tracksuit under his long winter coat and is fiddling with a device on a tripod. It’s a laser microphone and it’s being aimed at the office windows.

It’s been a week since McCrum’s Edo Kurniawan story went live. Wirecard’s shares immediately took a tumble, and the company’s response was unsurprising: flat-out denial. Disappointed that they couldn’t publish everything they had on Wirecard, McCrum was glad to now have a stack of trump cards left.

Chapter 6: An external audit by KPMG finally brings the truth to light, and Wirecard falls.

The headline of McCrum’s biggest Wirecard story is: “Suspect Accounting Practices Revealed.” It comes out on October 15, 2019, and by now, you can probably guess what happens next: Wirecard CEO Markus Braun denies everything, of course. Only this time, there’s irrefutable evidence.

Remember that spreadsheet full of liquidated business partners that caused McCrum to gasp out loud? FT has email transcripts of Wirecard staff discussing it. Meaning, there’s no way the spreadsheet is fake.

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Worum geht es in Money Men?

Money Men (2022) is the astonishing story of the rise and fall of Wirecard. Once described as the PayPal of Europe, it took a small group of analysts, whistleblowers, and the tenacity of one journalist to finally bring this house of cards down.

Wer Money Men lesen sollte

Financial crime die-hards
Lovers of all things stranger-than-fiction
Cautious investors

Über den Autor

Dan McCrum is a British journalist with the Financial Times. He has been recognized with numerous awards and prizes for his reporting on Wirecard. He was named Journalist of the Year in 2020 by the British Journalism Awards.

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