Die hingegeben müssen vor den untersuchungssauschuss angehört werden.
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Anbei ein Interview mit den whistleblowern, die den Skandal an die BaFin herangetragen haben. Diese sollten in jedem Falle auch im Untersuchungsausschuss geladen und angehört werden.
Sie sind fest davon überzeugt, dass die BaFin wegen ihren Beziehungen zu dem Unternehmen, ihrer Aufsichtspflicht nicht nachgegangen sind und abgewickelt haben. Sie sind damit für den Schaden an uns Kleinanlegern verantwortlich.
CPJ: How did you feel when the German financial regulator out of all regulators in the world started investigating you?
S.P.: At first it was quite stressful that the regulator of one of the largest financial markets in Europe recommended that a criminal complaint be filed against us. The stress quickly gave way to pure incredulity. Mainly because we knew that the reporting was solid. It was almost surreal that we were the ones being targeted. Up until that moment, I believed that the information we discovered could have been of use to anyone overseeing Wirecard. It was jarring, unexpected, surprising, unbelievable.
D.M.: It felt completely mad. It is one thing to be accused by Twitter bots but when the German financial regulator says that we are investigating you for corruption, you ask yourself, what on earth is going on? It was more frustrating than anything because it is so hard to print a story in a UK context raising allegations of fraud. You have to have so much evidence, you are taking such legal risk. So it was baffling to understand what the German regulator was seeing that we did not after we were publishing repeatedly evidence of significant problems at a very large company. It became stressful because what Wirecard turned it into was a question between its reputation and the reputation of the Financial Times. But I did not take the chance of being prosecuted that seriously because I knew that was just nonsense. At the same time you start feeling that you are banging your head to the brick wall.
CPJ: Did the German regulator reach out to you after they closed the investigation acknowledging that your reporting was accurate, the allegations unfounded?
D.M.: Not in the slightest. We only had an official notice about closing the investigation. I think BaFin [Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority]fundamentally did not understand how journalism works and did not attempt to find out. The suspicions it raised were groundless and if you know anything about journalism ridiculous, too. A key thing BaFin found suspicious was that we did not publish everything we had in one go. We wrote three stories in a space of a week, with two pieces with lots of information and a third feature piece. They seem to think that we were doing that to maximize profit for speculators. They sort of admitted that that was a misunderstanding but they investigated who might have leaked it, by implication suggesting they still think someone at the FT is corrupt.
S.P.: It was very confusing. The question to which we still have no answer is why they started the investigation at all. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about their motives.
D.M.: To be fair to BaFin: the one piece of evidence was an unsigned witness statement provided by a former convicted criminal who claims that he had advanced knowledge of the first story we published January 30, 2019. This person supposedly thought that the story was going to be published at 1 pm although 1 pm was the deadline which was given to the company to react. BaFin does not seem to have considered the possibility that Wirecard had itself access to this information and may have leaked it as a pretext to discredit us. There has been a fundamental failure of imagination at best on the part of the regulator.
CPJ: What is your take-away from all this? Is it that people do not trust the media and financial regulators are just people like anyone else? Or is it more that German financial regulators might be intertwined with those they are supposed to oversee?
D.M.: I wouldn’t tar all financial regulators in the world with the same brush. We don’t have the answer, but there is going to be a parliamentary inquiry in Germany which I hope will get to the bottom of why Wirecard appeared to have a close relationship with BaFin over several years.
(HINWEIS: DIESEN LETZTEN SATZ BITTE BEHERZIGEN, DAS IST DER GRUND, WESHALB DIE BAFIN NICHT GEHANDLET HAT UND PRIVATANLEGER ENTSCHÄDIGT WERDEN MÜSSEN. WIR REDEN HIER VON RUND 3 MRD EURO)
S.P.: The Singapore regulators reacted differently: days after we published our first piece, the police were raiding Wirecard offices, launched a criminal investigation and remained pro-active. The question is still whether German regulators took the time to go through all that we published, which paints a clear picture of what was going on at the company. And if not, why did it not happen? And how did they end up by investigating the journalists themselves?
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