MONEY MEN is out today!
The thrilling true story of Wirecard’s wild rise and crashing fall charts an investigation like no other. It reveals hidden worlds of short sellers and whistleblowers, pornographers and private militias, hackers and spies. 🧵1/6 amazon.co.uk/House-Wirecard…
It starts with a handshake in the LA office of Hustler’s Larry Flint. Everyone involved keeps doubling down until an encounter with “the dark lord of the internet” sets Wirecard on a path to fantastical riches and inevitable destruction. 2/6 theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
At the heart is a whizz kid in a hurry. He has no idea what he’s doing and his mad schemes backfire. Yet it somehow works and, with a copy of Sun-Tzu’s the art of war under his arm, Wirecard’s ‘chaotic genius’ takes his holidays in a Syrian warzone with Russian Mercenaries. 3/6
It’s a sunny afternoon, who wants to talk about people who have inspired you through the example they set?
I’ll go first, let me tell you a little about David McCrum, my dad.
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Dave, as he's known to his friends, sold cars to embassies for Ford. He has some terrific stories about befriending diplomats with blinding amounts of gin, but that's not the example I'm thinking of, I wasn't around yet.
He got headhunted to British Leyland, ended up with a top job at the tractor unit, and soon realised it was doomed. He was waiting till after a holiday using the company car to quit, when they sat him down and handed over a big redundancy check.
The #cryptocrash reminds me a little bit of the day Wirecard announced €1.9bn of its money was "missing".
(June 18, 2020, two years ago this week)
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All the investors, long and short, knew a day of reckoning was coming. Publishing audited results could be put off no more. The big unknown was if EY would be duped, again, and sign the accounts for the tenth year in a row.
🚨Competition time 🚨
To mark publication of MONEY MEN, the stranger than fiction thriller about Wirecard's multi-billion dollar fraud, I have 2 proof copies to give away.
To enter: predict the $ price of Tether at 10pm BST today. $0.9977 now
Closest wins one.
Reply to win!
Thank you for playing. The 10pm Tether price hit 0.9986.
For background on Wirecard collapse today, these are the two key stories.
In October, we wrote that sales and profits appeared fraudulently inflated. ft.com/content/19c6be…
In December, we wrote that "trustee accounts" were included in cash balances. ft.com/content/845b0d…
The Wirecard fraud centres on faked documents.
Where did we start last year?
Whistleblower allegations of forged invoices and bogus contracts at its Asian headquarters