The book it's based on, Money Men by Dan McCrum, is also a spectacular read.
When Dan McCrum was under threat of arrest in Germany, that was because Paul Murphy, Dan's editor, did in fact give away to some of his contacts the fact that they were coming out with a negative story on Wirecard and the time it would be published. Murphy has form for trading his own scoops with stock traders for favours. The Wirecard recording of one of Murphy's mates talking about shorting Wirecard to take advantage of the story is accurate and had Murphy (but I very much doubt McCrum) bang to rights.
McCrum's explanation for this is that Murphy's associates knew the exact time of the story being released because they had happened to guess it by sheer luck. Clearly if that's what Murphy told him he should have been a little more skeptical.
Ultimately the FT's internal investigation into Paul Murphy's behaviour and BaFin's into McCrum's work were abandoned for the same reason: the Wirecard revelations were legit, and much more serious than Murphy's breaches of journalistic ethics.
Just shows how persistent lies and propaganda can be.
The other (baseless) accusations you're talking about (and that led BaFin to investigate the FT) are extensively covered in the book.
Edit: Not sure it was insider trading, or illegal. Just probably not in line with FT standards.
But if the trade came up as a matter of an investigator researching a company, and communicating with people about the details. Even if they disclosed the exact time they planned on publishing this information, is it insider trading?
Wouldn't you have to been privy to information from inside the company itself? Otherwise anybody could have investigated this person, and had equal opportunity to discover negative things to expose?
On the other hand, there may be ethical (but not legal) issues from the perspective of the publisher.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/how-the-bigges...