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Comment by the_mitsuhiko | Hacker News Reader

The entire story is shameful. I can just hope the Germans learn lessons from this.

The lessons learned will be "hide your crimes better". And a few token gestures. This kind of crime is just too profitable, and the "little man" will not start any larger protests over it. So there is no desire anywhere in substantial changes.

Billions of dollars just turned out not to be there. I'm going to throw out a challenge to the idea that the "little man" was the loser here on the basis that little men do not have billions of dollars to lose. Someone bigger than little lost here.

If every man, woman and child in Germany chipped in $1,000 that still isn't a billion dollars.

It'd be around 80 billion dollars, actually

I think he confused the us billion (10⁹) with the german billion (10¹²) ;)

Yeah, that's probably it!

What? So what do German use for 10^9, Milliarden?

In French we use Milliard for billion and Trilliard for Trillions (and millions for millions).

yep. Millionen, Milliarden, Billionen, Billiarden, Trillionen, Trilliarden

Wow, French living in Germany for over 10 years, never realized that Billion meant something else here.

I guess I'm not rich enough, ahah.

but he used "billions" correctly in the first sentence

How many people do you think live in Germany?

Less than 8,000 apparently.

Common mistake if you come from a language using the long scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

I guess instead of saying "a billion dollars" we should say "1 Gigadollar"

Mmm, I'd like to spend no more than half a kilorupeee on dinner.

I was surprised the first time I read about crore and lakh, they take some time to get used to.

Pension funds, general investments, small-time stockholders will loose money, and all that does affect the "little man". It is just indirect and hidden enough that most won't complain.

>I can just hope the Germans learn lessons from this.

N'ah! When it comes to big banks, big industry, big infra projects, German state institutions are super corrupt, it makes Wall Street and the City of London look like saints.

Sources?

Wirecard, Dieselgate, BER Airport, German gov wireing the whole country with copper instead of fiber because the ministry of infrastructure had connections to the copper business leaving the country's internet behind Ukraine, all Gov IT projects going to SAP or T-Systems with no accountability, etc.

Nobody went to jail for any of those and in some cases it was never investigated. If you're on the DAX, you're untouchable in Germany.

Do you have a source for the copper claim? That is entirely new to me.

https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/deutschland-warum-unsere...

[Translated from German] Christian Schwarz-Schilling had been Post Minister under Helmut Kohl since 1982 and launched the German mobile phone network at the end of the 1980s. His political understanding of infrastructure can be seen in a disturbing fact: Until a few hours (!) before he was sworn in as Post Minister - Schwarz-Schilling was involved in a copper cable company. He sold his shares to Nixdorf. The company was then "one of the most important newcomers in the cable business". Contrary to most expert advice, Schwarz-Schilling pushed the extensive investment in copper cable instead of fibre optics during his term of office, in other words: politically, he acted entirely in the interests of the buyer of his shares. In any case, exactly 30 years ago, SPIEGEL called the mobile phone licensing for which Schwarz-Schilling was responsible "a festival of lobbyists".

The fact that nobody got jailed for this obvious corruption is staggering to me and German politicians dare lecture Southern Europe on corruption.

Holy hell. Thanks for this one.

More recently, Germany's insistence to go all in the hydrogen economy has the same flair.

Hydrogen is a backup plan, and a sensible one at that. Germany doesn't have much in terms of lithium and other precursors for batteries, besides we have an awful lot of old rural non electrified train routes where the cheapest option by far is to go to hydrogen.

You forgot about Deutsche Bank. David Enrich has written a lot about criminal activities going on in there. It is a bank for the "unbanked elites", that is for people that will no longer be accepted by any other financial institution.

That being said - we will certainly see a lot of fraud in other countries too. The fraud cycle follows the business cycle.

Deutsche Bank is not a state institution, neither is it partially or fully owned by a state entity (like Deutsche Bahn or VW). The national bank would be deutsche Bundesbank.

Scandals are everywhere, as is corruption. In comparison, Germany is #13 on the Democracy Index [1]. It is right below The Netherlands and Switzerland, the top countries being the Scandinavian ones, plus Anglo-Saxon countries (New Zealand, Canada, Australia).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

AFAIU the Democracy Index is based on, essentially, people making up numbers.

The broad classifications are probably alright, but I wouldn't pay much attention to the specific rankings.

@Fnoord (can't respond to your comment directly weirdly) How can anyone seriously rank Australia and the UK so far high up?

Comparatively, that's unlikely to be true.

€1.9bn is pocket money compared to Wall St's and the City's more creative frauds.

The UK is currently dealing with a government minister who was involved in questionable planning oversight for a single development scheme worth £1bn - and that's barely even a footnote in the news here.

By 'barely even a footnote', you must mean front page news on most newspapers today: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-papers-53173316

In a historical context, that's still a footnote.

Especially compared to - say - the suppressed Russia report, or the non-existent disclosure about the true sources of funding for Brexit, or the fact that the government wasted £12m on an app that does nothing, or the sum total of various other Brexit- and Covid-related contracts to various government cronies, donors, and associates, and which appear to have supplied nothing of value to taxpayers.

German here. Big infra projects here rarely fail due to corruption. The way, way bigger issue is that in the last 30 years public service funding was drastically cut which meant that the oversight competence over projects was no longer in house. Overworked officials rubber-stamp utter bullshit because they have neither the knowledge nor the time to properly audit plans. Not just architectural or technical (hello BER fire suction system), but especially financial.

The mandate from the EU is that all kinds of stuff must be offered via tender europe-wide which is for many things a colossal waste of money and enviromental resources (e.g. a Polish company wins a tender for a construction project in Spain and now has to move all the machinery and staff through Europe and back, that's NOT sustainable!), and while government entities are allowed to judge bids by sustainability or profitability (i.e. purposefully offering an unprofitable bid in the hopes of making the profit with exploiting "change requests"), they rarely have the knowledge to do so.

The trouble is that lack of public tender means cosy deals, national champions and less of a free market.

If some costs aren't being priced in, then procedures should be changed to price them appropriately. I'm not sure the answer is to permit cosy deals between politicians and their patron companies, or depriving citizens of the services of best providers in the market.

I'm not sure the City of London can be made to look like saints of financial regulation, given their previous problems with PPI mis-selling, and the disintegration of a number of supposedly "safe, well capitalized" banks in the 2007/8 crash.

Whilst you'd hope that lessons were learned, I'm not sure they were.

That was the banks and insurance companies.

I am really unsure if it's something "Germans" need to learn. It is probably something that could happen everywhere...

One weird thing I have noticed is that in the UK the phrase “The Germans” is often used instead of “Germany” (where it’s grammatically valid, of course) for some reason. It’s really noticeable if you watch British TV coverage of the World Cup or European Championships.

Don’t know if the OP is British or living there, but it’s possible that this is what’s happening and they don’t mean “all Germans ...” and just mean “The appropriate body in Germany the country ...

I think UK English carries the intent that Germany is a physical place - an abstract legal notion. While The Germans are the people who live in this place. The place and notion can't really learn anything, while the people who live there could learn something.

Very common here in the US to do this with all countries. "Germany" is a country, whereas "Germans" are people. So in a sporting context saying something like "The Germans are better at passing the ball" makes more grammatical sense than "Germany is better at passing the ball". Same for the Italians, the French, etc.

It’s not quite the same actually. You’ll see the commentators occasionally reference Italy/The Italians or France/the French ... but the way they use “The Germans” is on a different level. I also feel like it’s also said with a weird intonation, so not “The Germans” but “The Germans” - with a little snarl :-D

I don’t know how to explain it - you’d need to watch a World Cup with BBC and ITV coverage to see it in action. England have a special footballing history with Germany so it may be related to this.

Note: not implying this was what the original person meant, this is just a silly tangent :-)

It's on the German financial monitor to have chosen "stop short selling" instead of "let's investigate this" when allegations surfaced last year.

In this sense, it's the Germans that need to learn something. It seems there is awareness of this[0].

Hopefully others will learn from it too, anyway.

[0]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-22/wirecard-...

Whilst I wouldn't put it that way , it does seem like the German financial regulators and investment industry have something to learn from the Wirecard problem.

When the FT and others started raising concerns about Wirecard's finances, BaFin took what I believe was an unprecedented step and sued the FT.

A better approach might have been to launch an earlier investigation into whether the allegations had any substance to them.

There also need to be lessons learned from an audit perspective. EY signed off on previous years accounts which now appear that they might have had issues...

It could happen anywhere -- the US has it's share of cowboys too. WeWork, Thanos etc. Ireland too has had a few cowboys.

Merkel might have to step in to clean this up -- it's embarrasing because of the number of German institutions that protected this fraud. The German Financial Regulator went after professionally accredited investigative journalists and seemed to indulge in other face palms.

Thanos, the famous Elizabeth Holmes' company that tried to kill the Avengers

Theranos. Certainly a hell of a typo.

With one snap of one's fingers, half the company's 'value' dies in an instant.

Theranos didn't try to kill the Avengers though.

German regulators absolutely do have to learn that this isn't something that could only happens elsewhere.

I agree. But that’s very different from saying “The Germans”

What should I learn from this? That there are fraudulent companies? You make it sound like all Germans are responsible for this.

That prosecuting journalists for reporting that a company is fraudulent should, at a minimum, be reserved for after it has been established that the company is not fraudulent.

The kneejerk insulted reactions to the original FT articles by BaFin and the German business press really haven't been up to par. They need to do a lot better.

I hope at the very least this Beissreflex that every shortseller is evil and should be investigated gets curbed. Wirecard since 2008 was having the support of Bafin of going against journalists and shortsellers who were calling out the company for market manipulation.

In Germany shortselling has an incredibly bad reputation. I think this is a problem.

Yeah, like the Americans with Madoff? Who "did not run a hedge fund but provided services to hedge funds"?

The SEC had also data provided from professionals that Madoff is either fraud or a ponzi and always ignored it. The sentence above was enough that they did not further investigate him.

What lessons exactly? Did they learn anything from the VW scandal?

  The Munich prosecutor's office, which is already investigating Braun on suspicion of manipulating Wirecard"s accounts, said "We will now look at all possible criminal offenses."

The type of behavior that brought Wirecard down is not a German thing, it is a human thing. We have the ability to think outside the box for profit and greed, and that, sometimes, gets us into trouble.

Another aspect is that the financial auditor responsibility. I am not sure if the financial auditor criminally complicit but I think we are going to figure it out soon.

Any lessons learned from Dieselgate? Or from Danske Bank laundering 236 bilions Russian money?

C'mon this is Europe... We are forgetting quickly here..

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