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Germany’s top financial supervisor dismissed a decade of warnings about Wirecard
301–310 of 350 posts
Re: Germany’s top financial supervisor dismissed a decade of warnings about Wirecard
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue is people are just not aware on the corruption in Germany because there's no "personal" and "everyday" corruption in a daily life. But if you look "up" the amount of corruption rise to the astonishing levels. Just remember Stuttgart 21 or the Berlin Airport, Hamburg Elb Philharmonic, Battleship Gorch Fock. Germany is full of such corrupt projects, it's obvious and everyone knows about it, but nobody yet wen…
>Stuttgart 21 or the Berlin Airport, Hamburg Elb Philharmonic, Battleship Gorch Fock None of those are examples of corruption, unless you have an almost unlimited understanding of what constitutes corruption.
There have been multiple corruption cases surrounding BER which also explains the level of incompetence at display here.
Re: Germany’s top financial supervisor dismissed a decade of warnings about Wirecard
#303Re: Germany’s top financial supervisor dismissed a decade of warnings about Wirecard
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
He sold his shares hours(!) before being signed on as minister and he sold them to the company that benefited the most from the copper cabling that he pushed for. How you can mistake this obvious corruption for incompetence is beyond me.
> He sold his shares hours(!) before being signed on as minister This is normal procedure. There is a rather short timeframe between appointment and becoming a minister. Of course did he sold it only after he know it would be a problem. > How you can mistake this obvious corruption for incompetence is beyond me. He had no benefits personally, so it's not corruption. This is just a nice story you tell the kids to give…
It’s true, they installed fibre in the 90ies when modernizing the phone network in the East.
A decade later those OPAL installations were replaced again by copper as they could not handle high speed Internet.
Re: Germany’s top financial supervisor dismissed a decade of warnings about Wirecard
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Stuttgart 21 or the Berlin Airport, Hamburg Elb Philharmonic, Battleship Gorch Fock None of those are examples of corruption, unless you have an almost unlimited understanding of what constitutes corruption.
There have been multiple corruption cases surrounding BER which also explains the level of incompetence at display here.
You are correct regarding the BER, apparently there have been some corruption accusations I didn't know about!
Re: Germany’s top financial supervisor dismissed a decade of warnings about Wirecard
#306Also, under Helmut Kohl, despite advice from experts to use fiber, the German government wired the whole country with copper instead because the ministry of infrastructure at the time had stocks in the copper business leaving the country's internet behind Ukraine or Belarus.[1] If you're on the DAX or a politician, you're untouchable in Germany and lots of people inside and outside of Germany have no idea of how insa…
The article referenced in your article about that is from 1983. [1] I don't think fibre optics technology was that established at the time. Helmut Kohl's chancellorship was from 1982-1998. During that time, after the German reunion there were large scale investments into an upgrade of the Eastern German infrastructure including fibre glass deployment in the new German Länder. Therefore for a long time this area had some of the most modern telecommunication infrastructure world-wide - and for that matter probably also highway infrastructure.
Re: Germany’s top financial supervisor dismissed a decade of warnings about Wirecard
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have it so good because they complain about stuff that is trivial relative to countries like Romania. It's a constant battle and to be satisfied is to give up.
Yeah, right. Survivor bias in action. Romania didn't choose to do a lot of the things it did. It didn't choose to be a Communist state for 45 years, for example. History matters. And if you think Romanians are somehow content: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017%E2%80%932019_Romanian_p... They were in the news everywhere, from Deutsch Welle to the New York Times. I find your comment dismissive of those down the ladd…
You are misinterpreting, it was thinking about how to be robust, not critiquing Romania
Re: Germany’s top financial supervisor dismissed a decade of warnings about Wirecard
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bribery isn't "hard to prove" but instead there are no credible bribery accusations at all. Missmanagement in massive infrastructure projects are a much more reasonable explanation. It also makes a lot of sense because the actors are often state government officials that have never overseen a comparable project. Planning an airport or a new flagship concert hall is difficult. I agree that there were serious mistakes…
Why would the management of a massive project be given to a group that has no experience with such a massive project?
There's a podcast on this. "How to fuck up an airport". The short answer is that all the bids were realistic-ish, and therefore too high for the budget. So the Berlin politicians went "We'll do it ourselves! Much cheaper!". And lo and behold...
Re: Germany’s top financial supervisor dismissed a decade of warnings about Wirecard
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, right. Survivor bias in action. Romania didn't choose to do a lot of the things it did. It didn't choose to be a Communist state for 45 years, for example. History matters. And if you think Romanians are somehow content: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017%E2%80%932019_Romanian_p... They were in the news everywhere, from Deutsch Welle to the New York Times. I find your comment dismissive of those down the ladd…
You are misinterpreting, it was thinking about how to be robust, not critiquing Romania
Ah, ok then :-)
Re: Germany’s top financial supervisor dismissed a decade of warnings about Wirecard
#310Also, under Helmut Kohl, despite advice from experts to use fiber, the German government wired the whole country with copper instead because the ministry of infrastructure at the time had stocks in the copper business leaving the country's internet behind Ukraine or Belarus.[1] If you're on the DAX or a politician, you're untouchable in Germany and lots of people inside and outside of Germany have no idea of how insa…
My impression is that during the formative decades of West German power structures (let's say late Adenauer to early Kohl), the entire surrounding culture of media, regulators and of course politicians and business people themselves, failed to develop an awareness for corruption because everything was so nicely self-regulated by what basically boils down to modesty. In terms of anti-corruption measures it was like th…
> Now decades of neoliberal ideology have swept away that modesty, greed has slowly shifted from vice to virtue, but the trust is still there.
Please explain your definition of “neoliberal” to us.