Scandal-hit payments firm Wirecard has said the €1.9bn (£1.7bn) missing from its accounts simply may not exist.
Wirecard’s chief executive quit on Friday as the search for the missing cash hit a dead end in the Philippines.
On Sunday the central bank of Philippines said none of the money appears to have entered the country’s financial system.
The German company also said it was withdrawing its financial results for 2019 and the first quarter of 2020.
“The Management Board of Wirecard assesses on the basis of further examination that there is a prevailing likelihood that the bank trust account balances in the amount of 1.9 billion EUR do not exist,” the company said in a statement on Monday.
It’s the cumulative gap between what they’ve been reporting as profits/income and what they’re really been making as income/profits. You know, mebbe?
As I said when the news first broke, *all* those working in the accounts department should remain under house arrest until the truth is discovered. A lot of investors have been scammed into buying shares that were massively overpriced and any links between those selling overpriced shares and those involved in falsifying accounts are prima facie evidence of insider dealing 9as well as fraud).
I liked the FT pic of a wirecard promo stand – “wirecard – reinventing payment”
https://www.ft.com/content/d51a012e-1d6f-11e9-b126-46fc3ad87c65
“It’s the cumulative gap between what they’ve been reporting as profits/income and what they’re really been making as income/profits.”
I have’t looked at what their cumulative profits were said to have been, but the alternative is that this is more than their accumulated profits and is actually customer money that’s been pinched. Particularly as it’s said to be a “bank trust account” – that sounds more like it should be holding customer money in transit.
Anyone know how much they process a day, and how long they hang on to it? Could this be done by delaying payments for a day, then pinching a day’s worth of payments? (Pinch Monday’s customers’ money, use Tuesday’s to pay Monday’s transfers, Wednesday’s to pay Tuesday’s, etc.)?
Richard, shurely someone, a big-time customer, would notice that going on? And you could presumably cover the gap by transferring the money from account A to account B, showing the auditors the account A balance at the beginning of the day and account B balance at the end of the day, like writing overlapping cheques to keep two overdrawn accounts in credit all the time. Unless you are already doing that of course…
Bloke in Germany said:
“you could presumably cover the gap by transferring the money from account A to account B”
That might explain how they’ve got away with it for so long, and why it’s taken KPMG months to do the investigation?
But the real shocker is that the German government used to criminal investigation to try to stop the FT reporting on the problems last year. Someone needs to be sacked for that, and his boss, and his boss’s boss.
If they are doing it carefully enough, with enough small, obscure, old-fashioned banks that don’t look too closely at whether funds are cleared or not, then they could possibly have made off with the entire assets several times over, plus the investment scam value.
Just think, if payments stop turning over, and a number of rather large unauthorised overdrafts suddenly appear…
“ That might explain how they’ve got away with it for so long, and why it’s taken KPMG months to do the investigation?”
Didn’t someone say KPMG have been auditing them for 10 years Ona previous thread? In which case ‘PMG dragging their heels may have been at about self preservation.
Bloke in Germany said:
“Just think, if payments stop turning over, and a number of rather large unauthorised overdrafts suddenly appear…”
You’re making it sound like a government pension scheme!
Naah, government pension schemes only iterate the leverage theft once to one and a half times. That doesn’t even come close to the subprime thing, let alone what these clowns may have pulled off!