Skandal! La chute de Wirecard

Having watched the Wirecard: A Billion Euro Lie Sky documentary earlier this year, I was interested to see how this James Erskine Netflix piece deviated from the original.

I'm pleasantly surprised as it takes an entirely different viewpoint, focusing mostly on the journalists, short sellers and MPs, rather than the former doc covering the whistleblowers and other influential parties.

What ensues is an interesting value-add to the Wirecard story that helps to elevate the already thrilling saga of accounting fraud. The focus on Dan McCrum and team adds flavour to the narrative that was missing in the Billion Euro Lie doc. I do wish the whistleblowers were interviewed at the same extent however - though I imagine this may have been down to pre-existing agreements that would conflict.

Overall, well worth a watch, and I'll await the third instalment of this documentary battle, coming from Amazon Prime, where they finally get Jan Marsalek to show his face.

There have been many documentaries & films over the past decade on the financial industry trying to give outsiders a glimpse into their usually mundane world, only to find that sometimes when they get it wrong it really is mammoth in proportions. In this case, we have a fascinating look into the world of now defunct German company Wirecard, which was pure criminal fraud right front of all our eyes, yet few even an eyelid, with there being either only some mavericks "shorting" them or a few genuine brave investigators. We have tales of politicians, financial gurus, outside investors, stock traders and one very brave FT newspaper journalist; all talking heads taking us through the machinations of this catastrophe.

What this doc does well is help to explain the ins & outs of the company, but also show the shere scale of the corruption underlying this company. Yet everyone was fawning over it, and clearly a blind eye was turned by everyone. It took some brave reporting despite the threats to reveal the truth.

However, I feel that this documentary is a little watered down. I guess for legal reasons there were more targets & names they could have attacked but didn't which is a shame, as at the end only a couple of names seem to be blamed when really there are plenty of more guilty parties involved. That lets it down but not enough to knock the film off the tracks.

As an introduction to the 'skandal' it's a fine start, but really I think something more meaty is required to forensically investigate all that took place. There may still be other "Wirecard" companies out there which we are all blind to!

If you want to know the reason why people hate short sellers this film will give you a good idea. The cartoon character in his Cannes pile bemoaning what he didn't make by literally doing nothing is a perfect example. Their's, and the journalists glee at bringing down a company that employed thousands of people, and hundreds of thousands of investors, is quite hard to stomach. No doubt the company was dodgy to say the least but neither party were working for the good of mankind. The short sellers thinking only of the profit to be made by destroying the business, and the journalists revenge for having the tables turned on them. As a film it's well made and if you don't know the story worth the effort, personally I can't get over the unsurpassed delight at seeing the business fail.

I had read about the reports that Dan McCrum published in the FT concerning Wirecard's nefarious activities, but didn't know the intricate details apart from the fact that he was put under immense pressure to retract his accusations both by Wirecard themselves (using lawyers and spooks), and by the German financial authorities.

This excellent documentary shows just how far the German authorities went to protect Wirecard because it was a home grown FinTech success story which blinded them to the fact that it was committing fraud on a massive scale.

The information I didn't know was how Russia was involved and why the company was founded in the first place.

Absolutely amazing documentary which shows just how far Russia had infiltrated into the German financial system, and I can guess into the London financial system too.

A very interesting documentary. Intense too, and challenging. You really have to concentrate to get everything. A bit too hard to follow sometimes maybe, the documentary sometimes opens pots it never closes, for example the investigation of the BaFin in the FT-Journalists. It is mentioned but no more.

Leaves many questions unanswered. What was the role of the german regulators, why didn't they see anything and so on. But that is okay because it's a documentary out of the perspective of the FT-Journalists and these POV is - as I said - very interesting. At this point a special remark on the music which I really loved.