Dan McCrum - Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth

Dan McCrum

MONEY MEN

A Hot Start-up, a Billion-dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth

Contents

About the Author

Dan McCrum is a member of the Financial Times investigations team. His reporting on Wirecard has been recognized with prizes from the London Press Club, the Society of Editors, the New York Financial Writers Association, the Overseas Press Club, and the Gerald Loeb awards. He was also awarded the Ludwig Erhard Prize for economic journalism, a Reporters Forum Reporterpreis and a special award by the Helmut Schmidt prize jury for investigative journalism. In 2020, he was named Journalist of the Year at the British Journalism Awards.

Cast of Characters

WIRECARD

SPIES

SHORT SELLERS AND ANALYSTS

BANDITS

The affectionate nickname for Paul Murphys pool of sources

FINANCIAL TIMES

Prologue

B Y J ANUARY 2019 I had spent two months cloistered in a bunker to one side of the Financial Times newsroom. Id worked off the grid, beyond the reach of online hackers, and each night my air-gapped computer and notebooks had gone into a safe with steel walls six inches thick. The paranoia I took home with me, eyeing fellow commuters with suspicion, alert for signs of the surveillance I knew my sources were under. They were nervous and impatient, then one of them fell ill. Shed thought it was stress, but her doctor had bad news: it looked like brain cancer. Would she live to see justice done?

Head bowed, I waited for the verdict of the editor, Lionel Barber. We were in his office on the first floor of the FT building in London, perched above the Thames by Southwark Bridge, where he delivered pep talks and dispensed bollockings. Seated with my back to the river, I looked at a picture of him playing cricket with the Pakistani professional turned politician Imran Khan as I tried to control my drumming foot. A popular and respected editor, Barber was a renowned dropper of names, known as Lionel the Movie for his habit of placing himself at the centre of dramatic events. Clubbable and enthusiastic when things were going well, he was forensic and ferocious when they were not.

It was dark outside, the end of the day, when the international edition was almost put to bed and he had time to see us. I watched Barber in his suit, tie and running shoes, the merest hint of grey at his temples, reading glasses on the end of his nose, marking up the story with a fountain pen as he called out errors and additions in a stern tone. He reached the end and paused for a moment, weighing it in his hands.