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Two possible buyers are still vying for Wirecard
Who wants to deal with the company scandal at all?

Friday, 17th October, 2020 - Investment News - reports only - we do not take any position or give any advice - we report independant and none political

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Wirecard has been completely smashed of 77 interested parties, only 2 left

Who are these two and what's behind them?

Santander the solid Spanish bank or Lycamobile with a dubious reputation?

The Italian payment provider Sia is apparently out of the running - according to information only the big bank is negotiating Santander and the mobile operator Lycamobile on the purchase of Wirecard parts. But Lycamobile has a dubious reputation.
In the past few weeks there was no longer a lot of news directly from Aschheim, it has almost become quiet around the Wirecard headquarters. Behind closed doors, the remaining prospective buyers speak to the insolvency administrator to buy parts of the business - while they Processing of the Wirecard scandal is in full swing.

WHAT WOULD A BUYER ACTUALLY BUY

Wirecard's business
Customer of illegal online gambling, Europe's or perhaps the world's largest money launderer, customer of a worldwide porn website and online Videos and customers of services that we may not yet know. (read more about it here at the end of the page)
Insolvency administrator Michael Jaffe started a few weeks ago with 77 prospective buyers, most recently the group has shrunk significantly - to four prospective buyers: the financial investor Apollo, the Italian payment group Sia, the major bank Santander and the mobile operator Lycamobile.
Now the final spurt begins: According to information from Finance Forward, only Santander and Lycamobile are still in the negotiations. The bank would buy the payment business. It has an important business area for Corporate customers and be interested in the technology and the customers, it says. Santander did not want to speak officially. But Santander wants himself really bring the problems of a scam company like Wirecard into the house, does Sanatnder suddenly want to be taken under the light of all supervisory authorities?
Santander already has the expertise in-house
If the Spaniards win the bid, they would also want to bring the offer to their other important markets in Latin America, insiders say. The calculation: through the online payment processing, the bank gains a low-margin, but stable business.
Santander already has the expertise in-house. With Chirag Patel, the bank acquired a high-ranking payment manager from Amazon a few years ago. "The acquisition would save a bank a lot of time because it does not have to build up the skills first, and experienced payment teams are very popular on the market", says industry expert Marcus Mosen. Expert opinion? Experienced payment team? Experience with money laundering - what an expert!
At the same time, Santander is not interested in Wirecard's German banking license, according to the company. And because of this, be the asking price lower than Lycamobile. The Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported a few weeks ago of 100 million euros as a possible price, that Santander wants to pay. 100 million for a bank license for a fraud company, a license that belonged to another bankrupt company before Wirecard? Whether it's worth it, because the license comes with a lot of contaminated sites.
The British telecommunications provider Lycamobile is likely to want to strengthen its own platform with the payment business. Behind the company is the British-Sri Lankan entrepreneur Subaskaran Allirajah, the company has 15 million customers according to its own statements . "Wirecard also claims it has earned 3 billion!" It specializes in migrants who come to their home countries at affordable prices can make calls. Lycamobile also has various other businesses, such as a flight search engine. Through the many small telephone shops (many of which are known for not entirely legal money transactions) it already has access to small dealers. A cheap payment deal between the countries would be conceivable - similar to, for example, Transferwise (also here there are legal doubts about the business model) operates very successfully.
But - Lycamobile has been criticized for money laundering - would fit!
Telecommunications companies have tried again and again to enter the payment business. Deutsche Telekom also tried the "Mywallet" project, however unsuccessful. In Kenya, Safaricom is very successful with the M-Pesa payment system, which millions of people use to pay - it is one of the few examples of success.
But Lycamobile in particular has regularly produced negative headlines in the past few years. The company has been into one in the past few years Money laundering scandal involved. French investigators arrested 19 employees who were accused of laundering money from criminal organizations. (That would be the perfect Wirecard partner)
The British government refused to cooperate with the investigation because the company is one of the largest donors to the Conservative Party, reported Buzzfeed 2018. The Paris attackers are said to have used Lycamobile SIM cards for communication. And lax standards are criticized. There was also a dispute with the British authorities about a lack of tax payments , as the Guardian reported earlier this year.
The German financial regulator Bafin has the last word in a sale, said insolvency administrator Michael Jaffe according to Sueddeutscher Zeitung. It is questionable, whether she would agree to a sale to Lycamobile. Santander is more in the sense of financial supervision, quoted the daily from the Wirecard environment. Nevertheless, it is said from the workforce that the British company has presented a better concept for the future.
What kind of concept can that be? One can only wonder, but in terms of the concept, Wirecard and Lycamobile (both not banks) are a better fit together as Santander.

Prosecutors have already investigated Wirecard

Since 2010, the Munich public prosecutor's office has conducted several investigations in the area of ​​the Wirecard payment group. After research it was also about incidents related to today's allegations and key people. But the investigation petered out! because Wirecard was the favorite child of the (Boersen) nation and main source of income in share speculation by celebrities, politicians and even the supervisory authority BaFin!
The scandal surrounding the payment processor Wirecard is one of the most costly cases with which the Munich I public prosecutor is dealing. Since the The group went bankrupt in June, the prosecution received dozens of criminal charges. The prosecutors are investigating ex-Wirecard boss Markus Braun and a number of other former top managers - among other things on suspicion of professional gang fraud and market manipulation. Run beyond it six preliminary investigations against ex-board members, in which it comes to money laundering. A mammoth process.
But the current investigations are by no means the first in which public prosecutors have investigated the scandal company from Aschheim. Like research by Finance Forward showed, there have been repeated investigations in the Wirecard environment in recent years due to various possible criminal offenses. Repeated it was about money laundering, but also about allegations that could have been significant in connection with the years of balance sheet manipulation. To a However, there was never any charge or conviction. It was not until this summer that the billion-dollar fraud was exposed.

Online gambling and suspected money laundering

As early as 2010, the public prosecutor's office in Munich I investigated the suspicion of money laundering after several reports. The proceedings were against "Unknown managers of the Wirecard Group", a spokeswoman said in the summer when asked by Capital Magazine. With the charge According to her, it was a question of "financial transactions in connection with online gambling in the USA", (A blunt lie, the online portals still exist in countries like Cyprus (Cyprus Papers Scandal) or other tax havens. According to insiders, Wirecard had Established a system in the 2000s with which illegal transactions for online casinos could be camouflaged. But the procedure in Munich was in February Discontinued in 2012 because, according to the authority's spokeswoman, "evidence of the crime could not be provided".
During this time, there were also further investigations by the public prosecutor in Munich I based on a suspected money laundering report from March 2011 went back. In this case it was about the Wirecard Bank belonging to the group, which, according to another bank, was fraudulent on behalf of two Companies should have collected direct debits from customers. In connection with the allegations, the Bafin also commissioned a special audit report given and evaluated by the investigators, as can be seen from a response from the Bavarian state government to the FDP parliamentary group. The procedure is but later discontinued , as there was a sufficient suspicion "especially with regard to the subjective factual side, intent or carelessness" could not be proven, as it says in the answer. Isaan News reported on this in detail, including videos on what was going on.
In the year 2016, too, a suspected money laundering report by another credit institution led to an investigation in this case with the public prosecutor Munich II . According to the Bavarian state government, it was about a money laundering notice, according to which the Wirecard Bank for transactions Online casino services are said to have carried out , specifically such as profit distributions to customers or payments to the providers. Later this became Proceedings handed over to the Public Prosecutor Saarbruecken . Upon request, their spokesman announced that the procedure taken over from Munich was one "Larger investigation complex" has been assigned to the trading of so-called binary options - that is, particularly speculative financial derivatives. It is about the suspicion of commercial gang fraud against the operators of various online trading platforms for allegedly trading with binary options. As the spokesman announced, the investigation is still ongoing . Current or former managers of Wirecard Bank would not listed as accused.

Who are the losers

It doesn't look good for long-standing shareholders

The Munich Public Prosecutor's Office

In 2019, the Munich public prosecutors received two reports from the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) in connection with Wirecard at the General Customs Directorate, where nationwide money laundering reports from banks are received and checked. On February 13, 2019, the FIU the suspicious activity report received by a private bank at the beginning of February after an initial examination at the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office - two weeks, after the "Financial Times" had reported on balance sheet irregularities at Wirecard. According to a confidential listing for the Bundestag, , The FIU saw indications of market manipulation in connection with a million dollar payment, in which Wirecard CEO Braun and Asia board member Jan Marsalek were involved "Especially with regard to the reports already in the press", as FIU boss Christof Schulte said in a non-public at the end of August Meeting of the Bundestag finance committee said. The LKA Bayern then reported the suspicion on February 15 to the public prosecutor in Munich I. However, this stopped her investigation in mid-April because she saw no sufficient evidence of a criminal offense. The question arises: What about the Public Prosecutor Muenchen , which has been closing the proceedings since 2010 because allegedly there is no evidence. Oh, the Minister of Finance (now candidate for Chancellor) Olaf Scholz is the employer who recognizes the employer of the "CumEx" and the "Panama Papers" certainly the "Cyprus Papers", there really can be no suspicion. In a second case, too, the FIU passed a suspicious transaction report on incidents in which there was a reference to today's allegations against Wirecard gives. As can be seen from the list for the Bundestag, this report at the beginning of June 2019 was about the third-party business for which Marsalek was responsible (TPA) of the payment group. It is now known that a large part of the sales with third-party partners in Asia, which is shown in the consolidated balance sheet was reported by Wirecard, did not exist. In this case, too, the FIU promptly forwarded the report to the Bavarian LKA . But also In this case the investigation (what a coincidence, because the gentlemen were already on trial in Singapore!) fizzled out. Only after the forgeries were exposed and the group went bankrupt, the public prosecutor's office in Munich ruled both cases from 2019 again to be included in active law enforcement.
However, the investigations that are ongoing today in connection with the Wirecard scandal do not relate to all of the previous misconduct of the Group - but only for the period from 2015. For the damaged shareholders who have held shares for a long time, that's a problem: You can presumably do not expect to get some of their money back by lawsuit . The public prosecutor's office Muenchen I helped in August freeze assets in the three-digit million range of four former Wirecard top managers and their private companies by arrest orders, to secure this for the injured. In contrast, an investor who had already bought shares in 2009 recently failed at the regional court Muenchen I with the application for a detention with ex-CEO Braun. In its decision, the court referred that the investigations by the public prosecutor only concern the period from 2015 onwards. It doesn't look good for long-standing Wirecard shareholders.

Fazit

As in the scrap real estate business, Bankscrap, only scrap dealers or dodgy companies buy scrap

Weitere links zum skandal

Nicht vergessen! der WireCard Fragenkatalog!

Kann ein Kanzlerkandidat so "inept" sein, oder hat er wissentlich gegen seine eigenen Anordungen verstossen?

Mehr Isaan News - More Isaan News - zu BaFin und Olaf Scholz, Jan Marsalek and the Criminal Club
The Bafin Zocker - Insider Trading - The Criminal Club continues and the Politicsis in between
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Under Investigation
BaFin und der Wirecard Betrug
Olaf Scholz am 17.7.2020 mitten drin
Scholz Knew about the entire WireCard since February2019-but Jan Marsalek was the Darling of the Nation and everybody needed to protect his millions!
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