Thread by @jameshurley

Senior Wirecard employees among shareholders and directors of opaque network of British companies linked to money laundering and disguised transactions
thetimes.co.uk/edition/busine…

Corporate filings reveal two Wirecard staff were shareholders in the entity which set up a network of hundreds of shell companies in Consett, County Durham, which were connected to pornography, gambling and dating websites

Simon Dowson, a local entrepreneur who ran the formations agent at the heart of the network, told me yesterday that Wirecard referred third party merchants to him to set up shell companies but that "if there was any untoward processing" he had no knowledge or involvement

Government's insolvency service shut 38 of the companies from the register following an investigation. One of the companies in the network was an obscure entity called Wire Card UK, set up by Rudiger Trautmann, former Wirecard COO

Wire Card UK has several links to another entity in the network, Bluetool, that breached money laundering rules by channelling gambling proceeds to the United States.

Wire Card UK also had common shareholders with another Consett-based entity called Bluemay, which owned 7red.com, an online gambling business. The Insolvency Service found that Bluemay was storing £36.3m in a Wirecard account despite having negligible profits.

In short, why were Wirecard staff involved in setting up companies that appear to be at least disguising the true nature of online transactions, i.e. misleading their own partners in the payment system?

The Consett network itself was originally revealed back in 2016 by this extraordinary report from @AlasdairPal
reuters.com/investigates/s…