Wirecard’s Former CEO is Arrested in Germany

The Wirecard saga continues; after resigning just last week due to a missing $2 billion former Wirecard CEO Markus Braun was arrested in Munich late yesterday; Braun is accused of inflating Wirecard’s sales volume with fake income according to the Munich city prosecutors; at the center of the probe is Wirecard’s use of third party acquirers which processed payments on behalf of Wirecard; Braun is also under suspicion of knowingly making the company more attractive to investors and customers than it actually was; Germany’s financial regulator, BaFin, said it had made mistakes in monitoring the business and called the episode a disaster; the missing $2 billion is equivalent to all the net income Wirecard has reported over more than a decade. The Wall Street Journal.

  • Peter Renton

    Peter Renton is the chairman and co-founder of Fintech Nexus, the world’s largest digital media company focused on fintech. Peter has been writing about fintech since 2010 and he is the author and creator of the Fintech One-on-One Podcast, the first and longest-running fintech interview series.