Wirecard and me: Dan McCrum on exposing a criminal enterprise

It is heartening that the FT funds - and stands behind - its excellent investigative team so well. Years of dogged pursuit of truth, in the face of well-resourced crooks deploying lawyers, spies and dirty-tricks merchants - and making complicit fools of regulators and auditors in the process - finally paid off.

From the piece:

> Overseeing the surveillance effort was a maverick Libyan, Rami El Obeidi. He was briefly the head of foreign intelligence in the transitional government installed after the country’s leader Colonel Gaddafi was killed in 2011. He liked to be addressed as “The Doctor” and always stayed at the Dorchester when in London, meeting there with officials from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority to press a case that I was crookedly conspiring with short-sellers to bring Wirecard down.

> It was “Dr Rami” who brought in an ex-special forces guy from Manchester called Greg Raynor to work the Wirecard case. He, in turn, reached out to an ex-MI5 counter-terrorism operative, Hayley Elvins, and together they assembled a collection of 28 private investigators to follow me, my colleagues and a baffling array of investors and hedge fund bosses, including Crispin Odey. ...

> Meanwhile, international law firm Herbert Smith Freehills jousted with the FT’s lawyers, and a daisy chain of investigations by Fieldfisher lawyers and consultants at Control Risks — based on information carefully provided by Wirecard — was used to reassure the audit team at EY about issues raised by the FT. By the time Wirecard collapsed, it was spending £120m a year on “advice”.

Well done Dan McCrum and the rest of his FT team. I wonder how much similar corporate crookedness goes unpunished because so few news outlets nowadays have the resources to afford such tenacity.

I cannot wait to read the book, or to see the film.

- edited to add ellipsis between 2nd and 3rd quoted paragraphs.

Amazing.