
Wirecard and me: Dan McCrum on exposing a criminal enterprise - jasoncartwright
https://www.ft.com/content/745e34a1-0ca7-432c-b062-950c20e41f03
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samizdis
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.

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cafard
Amazing.

