London, July 20 (HNA) – Financial Times reporter Dan McCrum’s book Money Men, in which he reveals all the details of his ‘gripping journey into the underworld of the global economy’, which he uncovered and reported with his extensive research, is now available in Turkish under the title “Para Adamları” from Scala Publishing.
‘By January 2019, I had spent two months in a warehouse in a corner of the Financial Times newsroom,’ McCrum begins in his book, in which the German-based technology company Wirecard announced on 25 June 2020 that it would file for bankruptcy after the €1.9 billion scandal.
Wirecard, which is seen as ‘the most promising company in the financial sector’, was shaken by the corruption scandal involving its CEO Markus Braun, who resigned just a week before the announcement of the bankruptcy application.
At that time, as far as it was reflected in the news, a deficit of 1.9 billion euros was detected in the investigation carried out on the company’s accounts. In the statement made by the company in this regard, it was stated that ‘This money never existed’.
Immediately after the incident, according to the news of the economy newspaper Handelsblatt, Felix Hufeld, President of the German Federal Banking Regulatory Authority (BaFin), stated that he was shocked that this scandal occurred in a country like Germany, where quality and reliability are at the forefront, and said, ‘This is a complete disaster.’
Dan McCrum explains that he prepares for the news by working ‘in isolation, out of the reach of hackers’ and that every night he locks his computer and notebooks in a safe with fifteen centimetre thick steel walls.
‘I carried this paranoia home with me, looking suspiciously at my commuters,’ McCrum said, ’I was constantly on guard because I didn’t want my sources to be spied on. My sources were nervous and impatient.’
More importantly, the shareholders of Wirecard, founded in 1999, included The Goldman Sachs Group, Morgan Stanley, Societe Generale S.A., Bank of America Corporation and Citigroup, and the scandal came to light after Ernst & Young, Wirecard’s auditor, refused to approve the financial results for 2019 on the grounds that more than €1.9 billion was missing from the company’s accounts.
Dan McCrum presents this chain of events, which has gone down in history as ‘Germany’s biggest financial scandal’, as ‘the culmination of years of research’.
Money Men, published on 16 June 2022 by Transworld Digital, a division of Penguin Random House in the UK, was published in Turkish two years later by Scala Publishing under the title “Para Adamları”.
The book, which details the investigations of a large team of editors, reporters and lawyers from the Financial Times (Lionel Barber, Nigel Hanson, Sam Jones, Cynthia O’Murchu, Paul Murphy, Stefania Palma), reveals in detail the ‘Wirecard scandal’, which emerged as a ‘fiery sprout company’ but later became the focus of a ‘billion dollar fraud’.