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Wirecard files for insolvency after financial hole laid bare

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Re: Wirecard files for insolvency after financial hole laid bare

#111

I wonder how many companies in the world are basially built on warm words without any real value behind. I made the experience that a lot of people don't really care if a company has positive revenue streams anymore, they don't even know what a balance sheet is. They simply invest because other people do. And those other people invested because people before them did. This new style "invest billions now in a lossy st…

The EY point is interesting. I'm not sure if it's still this way, but when I worked there, a lot of care was put on audit clients as the partner(s) signing off the work had effectively unlimited liability, and could lose pretty much all their money in a worst case scenario. Unfortunately audit work, where the company decides on their auditor, has an in-built conflict of interests. If the auditor is too harsh/rigorous…

> If the auditor is too harsh/rigorous, then they risk losing the audit

How is this a thing ?

Re: Wirecard files for insolvency after financial hole laid bare

#112
post #98

A total of around $2B has simply "disappeared" -- as in, no one yet has been able to figure out what happened to it. I keep imagining a Monty Python-esque skit: "Was it stolen? We don't know." "Was it spent? We don't know." "Was it lent? We don't know." "Was it transferred? We don't know." "Was it burned? We don't know." Coincidentally, or maybe not, the company's last fictitious balance sheet, which was published in…

Hin Leong[0] is about to go the way of wirecard with a ’hole’ of mere $3B USD.

I’ll hazard that we’re seeing only the firsts in a wave of [cooked up] companies imploding.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/massive-forgery-helped-hide-3-b...

Re: Wirecard files for insolvency after financial hole laid bare

#113
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wirecard, Dieselgate, BER Airport, German gov wireing the whole country with copper instead of fiber because the ministry of infrastructure had connections to the copper business leaving the country's internet behind Ukraine, all Gov IT projects going to SAP or T-Systems with no accountability, etc. Nobody went to jail for any of those and in some cases it was never investigated. If you're on the DAX, you're untoucha…

You forgot about Deutsche Bank. David Enrich has written a lot about criminal activities going on in there. It is a bank for the "unbanked elites", that is for people that will no longer be accepted by any other financial institution. That being said - we will certainly see a lot of fraud in other countries too. The fraud cycle follows the business cycle.

Deutsche Bank is not a state institution, neither is it partially or fully owned by a state entity (like Deutsche Bahn or VW). The national bank would be deutsche Bundesbank.

Re: Wirecard files for insolvency after financial hole laid bare

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EY point is interesting. I'm not sure if it's still this way, but when I worked there, a lot of care was put on audit clients as the partner(s) signing off the work had effectively unlimited liability, and could lose pretty much all their money in a worst case scenario. Unfortunately audit work, where the company decides on their auditor, has an in-built conflict of interests. If the auditor is too harsh/rigorous…

> If the auditor is too harsh/rigorous, then they risk losing the audit How is this a thing ?

Because you can switch to another firm which is more friendly to you.

Re: Wirecard files for insolvency after financial hole laid bare

#115
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wirecard, Dieselgate, BER Airport, German gov wireing the whole country with copper instead of fiber because the ministry of infrastructure had connections to the copper business leaving the country's internet behind Ukraine, all Gov IT projects going to SAP or T-Systems with no accountability, etc. Nobody went to jail for any of those and in some cases it was never investigated. If you're on the DAX, you're untoucha…

@Fnoord (can't respond to your comment directly weirdly) How can anyone seriously rank Australia and the UK so far high up?

[deleted]

Re: Wirecard files for insolvency after financial hole laid bare

#117

I wonder how many companies in the world are basially built on warm words without any real value behind. I made the experience that a lot of people don't really care if a company has positive revenue streams anymore, they don't even know what a balance sheet is. They simply invest because other people do. And those other people invested because people before them did. This new style "invest billions now in a lossy st…

> They were satisfied with a clumsy fake audit certificate for 2 billion euros in a Philippine account! For how many companies EY did the same? How superficially do they check their customers? A lot. Like a lot a lot. The entire* commodities sector is built on promises like this. The entire shipping and freight sector. The entire commercial paper market. Its promises, redundancies, assurances, and credit. It usually…

But the commodities sector has entire organisations built around checking that cargo of cane sugar /coffee really is what it says what it is.

Edited for spelling

Re: Wirecard files for insolvency after financial hole laid bare

#118
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say cardinal sin would have been not storing amounts as integer.

(googler, opinion my own) Just go give 2 ways of doing money storage in ints from Google's APIs... For Google's Standard Payments APIs, we use micros: https://developers.google.com/standard-payments/v1/fops/bank... > To represent a monetary value in micros, multiply the standard currency value by 1,000,000. > USD$1.23 = 1230000 micro USD Sadly, its different than other parts of Google with money/amount based APIs. GC…

From reading other comments it seems that "micros" aren't precise enough to represent one satoshi if the unit is whole bitcoin.

Re: Wirecard files for insolvency after financial hole laid bare

#119
post #44

Trade on shares in the company was suspended What does this mean? Is a certain stock exchange not executing trades anymore? Are all exchanges worldwide in sync not executing trades? If so, how is the sync achieved? If it only was suspended at the Frankfurt stock exchange which is mentioned in the article, it would be interesting to see how it is doing at other exchanges. Google is still showing realtime Frankfurt pri…

What other exchanges are they listed on? It is pretty uncommon for a company to ever list on more than one exchange.

Shell is dual listed and plenty of foreign companies have ADR's on the US exchanges

Re: Wirecard files for insolvency after financial hole laid bare

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EY point is interesting. I'm not sure if it's still this way, but when I worked there, a lot of care was put on audit clients as the partner(s) signing off the work had effectively unlimited liability, and could lose pretty much all their money in a worst case scenario. Unfortunately audit work, where the company decides on their auditor, has an in-built conflict of interests. If the auditor is too harsh/rigorous…

> If the auditor is too harsh/rigorous, then they risk losing the audit How is this a thing ?

Auditing large corps is a profitable business with only a few players "capable" of doing. If one auditor asks too many questions the competitor is happy to take over.
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