Wirecard's €1.9 Billion Never Existed. Germany's Regulator Investigated the Journalists Who Said So First.

On 18 June 2020, EY told Wirecard's management board it could not confirm that €1.9 billion the payments company claimed to hold in trustee accounts at two Philippine banks actually existed. Within days, BDO Unibank and the Bank of the Philippine Islands said they had never held any such accounts for Wirecard, and that the confirmation documents bearing their letterheads were forgeries. A week later, Wirecard — a DAX-30 constituent that had briefly been worth more than Deutsche Bank — filed for insolvency owing creditors roughly €3.5 billion.

Sixteen months earlier, Germany's financial regulator BaFin had already taken decisive action on Wirecard. It banned short-selling of the company's shares and filed a criminal complaint for market manipulation — against the two Financial Times journalists who had been reporting that Wirecard's accounts didn't add up.

The Numbers

• €1.9 billion: the sum in supposed Philippine trustee accounts that EY could not verify existed, disclosed 18 June 2020.
• €24 billion: Wirecard's approximate market capitalization in August 2018, when it overtook Deutsche Bank's roughly €20.5 billion to become Germany's most valuable financial firm by market cap, according to Bloomberg.
• 24 September 2018: the date Wirecard formally joined the DAX 30, replacing Commerzbank.
• €3.5 billion: total debt owed to creditors when Wirecard filed for insolvency on 25 June 2020 — €1.75 billion borrowed from a syndicate of 15 banks, €500 million from bond investors, and the remainder from other liabilities — making it the first DAX company ever to go bust.
• €140 million: damages a Munich civil court ordered Markus Braun and two other former executives to pay the insolvency administrator in September 2024 over unrecovered loans to an Asian business partner.

The Regulator's Priorities

On 18 February 2019, BaFin issued a formal order banning the establishment or expansion of net short positions in Wirecard shares — the first time in the regulator's history it had shielded a single company this way. BaFin's own publication of the order cites the share price collapse that followed a series of Financial Times investigative articles as the justification.

The same year, BaFin filed a criminal complaint with Munich prosecutors against FT reporters Dan McCrum and Stefania Palma, alleging their reporting on Wirecard may have amounted to market manipulation coordinated with short-sellers. German lawyers reportedly warned the Financial Times that if the journalists traveled to Germany while the complaint was active, arrest was a realistic possibility, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists and Press Gazette's account of the investigation.

Munich prosecutors did not close that investigation until 3 September 2020 — more than two months after Wirecard's own collapse — stating they had found the reporting to be "fundamentally accurate" and no evidence the journalists had colluded with short-sellers or traded on inside information, per the Washington Post's reporting on the closure.

The Reporting BaFin Investigated

Dan McCrum's first piece questioning Wirecard's numbers, "The House of Wirecard," ran on the FT's Alphaville blog in April 2015. The investigation continued for years, drawing on leaked internal documents, before the FT published a major story on 30 January 2019 describing forged and backdated contracts behind a string of suspicious transactions in Wirecard's Asian operations.

A further FT investigation in October 2019, sourced substantially to a whistleblower account from Wirecard's Singapore office, detailed alleged efforts to inflate revenue and profits through fictitious partner-business transactions. Wirecard denied wrongdoing throughout and commissioned an outside review by KPMG, which in April 2020 reported it could not verify large parts of the profits Wirecard had booked in the disputed business lines.

The Collapse

• 18 June 2020: EY declines to sign off on Wirecard's 2019 accounts, saying it cannot confirm the existence of €1.9 billion in cash.
• 19 June 2020: Markus Braun resigns as CEO.
• 22 June 2020: Braun turns himself in to Munich prosecutors after a judge issues an arrest warrant; he is released the next day on €5 million bail.
• 25 June 2020: Wirecard files for insolvency, owing creditors approximately €3.5 billion.
• COO Jan Marsalek is dismissed the same week and does not return to Germany; a warrant is issued for his arrest and he is placed on Interpol's wanted list.

Where Everyone Ended Up

Markus Braun's criminal trial on fraud, breach-of-trust, and accounting-manipulation charges opened at the Munich regional court on 8 December 2022. As of early 2026 it remains ongoing, extended repeatedly and running past 260 court sessions with no verdict delivered — meaning Braun has now spent more than five years in pretrial and trial-phase detention without a criminal conviction, a point his lawyers have raised in unsuccessful appeals, per the Irish Times' 2026 reporting on the case.

Jan Marsalek has not faced trial. A 2025 joint investigation by The Insider, Der Spiegel, and other outlets, reported by the Moscow Times, alleged he has lived in Moscow under the false identity "Alexander Nelidov" with the protection of Russia's FSB security service, and that he has traveled to Crimea and occupied Ukrainian territory. Multiple European intelligence assessments and the reporting outlets attribute these Russian intelligence ties to Marsalek; he has not been able to respond publicly given his fugitive status, and the claims rest on investigative sourcing rather than a court finding.

Dan McCrum and Stefania Palma, cleared by Munich prosecutors in September 2020, published further reporting on the case; McCrum's 2022 book on the investigation, Money Men, was later adapted into the Netflix documentary Skandal!.

The Parliamentary Reckoning

The Bundestag launched a formal parliamentary inquiry into the collapse in autumn 2020, with the power to summon officials and compel document production. A cross-party draft report running to roughly 675 pages, released in 2021, concluded that then-Finance Minister Olaf Scholz bore political responsibility for BaFin's supervisory failures and criticized Chancellor Angela Merkel's government for what it characterized as naivety toward Wirecard's lobbying efforts, according to Bloomberg's coverage of the committee's findings.

The inquiry's opposition members called for the resignations of Germany's top financial watchdogs. Separately, German prosecutors opened their own investigation into whether BaFin officials had engaged in insider trading or dereliction of duty related to their handling of the Wirecard file.

Munich prosecutors spent from April 2019 to September 2020 — sixteen months — deciding that two journalists who had accurately reported a €1.9 billion accounting fraud were not, in fact, criminals. Markus Braun's own criminal trial, over the fraud those journalists first described in 2015, has now run more than three times as long without reaching a verdict.

Filed from public reporting:

• BaFin — General Administrative Act on the prohibition on establishing and increasing of net short positions in Wirecard AG
• CNBC — Germany's Bafin bans Wirecard short positions, cites negative reports
• Washington Post — German prosecutors drop probe of journalists over Wirecard
• CNBC — Former Wirecard CEO Markus Braun arrested
• Irish Times — Wirecard collapses owing €3.5 billion
• Bloomberg — Meet the German Fintech That's Now Worth More Than Deutsche Bank
• Bloomberg — German Lawmakers Probing Wirecard Say Top Watchdogs Should Quit
• Press Gazette — FT Wirecard investigation: How Dan McCrum harpooned his 'white whale'
• Moscow Times — Fugitive Wirecard Executive Living in Moscow Under False Identity, Investigation Reveals
• Irish Times — Wirecard trial shows the risks of slow legal process
• AML Intelligence — Wirecard ex-CEO Braun, two others ordered to pay €140M
• Al Jazeera — In swift, spectacular implosion, Wirecard officially goes bust