Regulation

How Germany’s regulator dismissed a decade of warnings about Wirecard

The market watchdog BaFin played down allegations, kicked the ball to other agencies and went after the disgraced firm’s accusers

Germany’s top financial supervisor received detailed warnings about deceptive financial practices at Wirecard starting in 2008 but repeatedly declined to investigate the allegations, turning instead against the accusers.

Over more than a decade, investors, US authorities, journalists and people close to the company warned of possible fraudulent accounting or money laundering, practices that are now at the heart of a criminal investigation into the disgraced fintech giant.

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