Wirecard: The scandal spreads to German politics | Hacker News Reader

Wirecard: The scandal spreads to German politics

ft.com

58 pointsamadeuspagel9 comments

Government always are full of con people who take advantage of weak laws, strong lobbyists and lots of money being spread around. Regulators (or even tax agencies) are weakened by politicians who want to enrich themselves, and everyone hopes it's the next person that gets caught. Bernie Madoff got away with his fakery for an eternity. These folks almost got away with it too (one is still on the lam). You have to have watchers (and someone to watch them, and hopefully a press that also watches).

Can only agree. European governments lobbied to keep weak emissions tests to keep their car industries churning along (The Guardian has an annoying soft registration wall that you can bypass by clicking "I'll do it [register] later": https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/24/uk-franc... ).

Of course the government officials probably weighed between jobs (employed voters are happy voters, and happy voters won't vote you out) and the environment, and, well, as the saying goes "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.".

I don't know that "full of" is a fair estimate, but the mechanisms that allow oversight agencies to be limited by whomever is in office at the time (see: USA) should be eliminated. There also seems to be emerging transnational collusions where companies, auditors, finance industries, etc. work to enable crimes by those companies.

Didn't they try to prosecute some watchers?

The other solution is shrinking the size, scope, and complexity of government. Trump is able to abuse the tax system because the code is impossible to understand, which creates the conditions for corruption.

We'll probably not see any resignations of politicians this shortly before an election, but there will likely be some people "missing" and being ignored for high-ranking ministerial and other positions. The people involved will just fade from the public eye and prepare to move to jobs in the private sector, while their respective political parties do damage control.

That is if they can drag this out for the remaining year.

I'm less sure of that than I was yesterday. It's moving a bit too fast...

>The people involved will just fade from the public eye and prepare to move to jobs in the private sector

Or to the EU Commission [wink, Ursula, wink] where they can spread their damage internationally.

Non-paywalled version: https://archive.is/IxHw5

Thank you kindly for this

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