'The money's gone': Wirecard collapses owing $4B

reuters.com

25 points·1cvmask··5 comments

I wonder how many companies in the world are basially built on warm words without any real value behind. I made the experience that a lot of people don't really care if a company has positive revenue streams anymore, they don't even know what a balance sheet is. They simply invest because other people do. And those other people invested because people before them did. This new style "invest billions now in a lossy start up and hope for a positive cashflow in a few years" is absolutely insane, it transformed the economy into a pure gambling hall.

What makes it even worse, in case of wirecard, their auditor EY had audited and certified wirecard's balance sheet for years with no objection. They were satisfied with a clumsy fake audit certificate for 2 billion euros in a Philippine account! For how many companies EY did the same? How superficially do they check their customers?

>How superficially do they check their customers?

I'm not an expert but maybe they just believed in the books. Or maybe they checked the documents, but the documents were forged, so checking the documents would have been useless.

The CEO called in KPMG to do an independent audit? Was he expecting a different result, or did he just pick them to break the news?

My guess would be that the fraud was reaching last-legs phases where other indications of missing cash were going to become difficult to ignore anyway. He may have thought he could actually stretch things out by stringing KPMG along and promising, "this audit will be done any day now, trust us."

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