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Germany’s top financial supervisor dismissed a decade of warnings about Wirecard

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Re: Germany’s top financial supervisor dismissed a decade of warnings about Wirecard

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see how you could call this corruption, he didn’t benefit from someone else getting rich. Unless there is any evidence that he sold his shares at an inflated price with the understanding that he would pay back the favour while in office or something like that, which I don’t think there is.

It doesn't matter who benefits from this deal, what matters is the country got shit infrastructure against the advice of his experts and the taxpayers paid for it. Since he signed off on this, it's on him to be investigated. That's what corruption is. Of course, if you want, you can cover it up in red tape and make it look like incompetence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption

First sentence:

> Corruption is a form of dishonesty or criminal offense undertaken by a person or organization entrusted with a position of authority, to acquire illicit benefit or abuse power for one's private gain

That's what corruption is.

Re: Germany’s top financial supervisor dismissed a decade of warnings about Wirecard

#152
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is entrenched in the (political) culture of Germany. As I said, metrics are difficult to compare, so determining the degree of corruption is always a poor approximation. Transparency International usually has some good data, but they are completely off when it comes to Germany. We have cases were public officials got bribes and weren't convicted or even didn't lose their position. Our former, former chancellor Koh…

You're claiming CPI is off as well as Transparency International. So what exactly are you basing your claim on that Germany has a "very high amount" of corruption? Just your personal impression? Seems very prone to be biased for many reasons.

CPI is by Transparency International, and it has basically nothing to do with corruption, it is a public image index: nothing more, nothing less.

Re: Germany’s top financial supervisor dismissed a decade of warnings about Wirecard

#153

Earlier 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…

So... if he hadn't pushed for copper and instead did the 'better for society' fiber solution, the company wouldn't have been worth nearly as much, possibly much less.

And those stock sales would have been much less profitable.

Not direct cash bribe but definitely far more motivated than just incompetence.

Re: Germany’s top financial supervisor dismissed a decade of warnings about Wirecard

#154

Earlier 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.

Please explain how this is “obvious corruption”.

He personally benefited by the increased share price of the company, which would have been vastly less if the policy choice had gone with fiber, which is the obvious choice for an infrastructure _upgrade_.

Personal financial gain by abuse of power.

Re: Germany’s top financial supervisor dismissed a decade of warnings about Wirecard

#155

Germany has a very high amount of corruption, even if the statistics look solid. This case of looking the other way is probably even a more benign example.

So does every other country in the world. Having less corruption than other places doesn’t mean that there’s no corruption.

Most people in Germany will never come into contact with corruption in their everyday life. In a lot of places around the world you will.

What this just shows is that we shouldn’t relax in our measures against corruption just because of some rankings.

Re: Germany’s top financial supervisor dismissed a decade of warnings about Wirecard

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please explain how this is “obvious corruption”.

He personally benefited by the increased share price of the company, which would have been vastly less if the policy choice had gone with fiber, which is the obvious choice for an infrastructure _upgrade_. Personal financial gain by abuse of power.

How did he benefit from the increased share price? He sold his shares before he came to power.

Re: Germany’s top financial supervisor dismissed a decade of warnings about Wirecard

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it unique? Didn't Gustl Mollath [0] also end up in a psychiatric facility and it started with him claiming that a bank was evading taxes? He was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility. After years in there it turned out that his claim about the tax evasion was reasonable. From what I can tell, he spent ~6 years locked up in a psychiatric facility and got €600,000 in damages. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org…

Did you actually read the Wiki page? There is a lot of context you are leaving out there. Based on my reading this was not some grand conspiracy by a bank to silence a critic. It sounds like this man certainly did have some psychological issues and assaulted his wife multiple times. Due to his history and his behaviour during the following court case he was locked up in psychiatric care. He did make allegations about…

> The judgment was based, among other things, on the opinion of expert Klaus Leipziger from Bayreuth, who attested to Mollath's paranoid delusions of a "black money complex"

> The first medical specialist statement on Mollath's mental health was created solely from information provided by his wife; the doctor in question, Gabriele Krach, consultant psychiatrist at the Klinikum am Europakanal, had not seen Mollath even once.

> In contrast, Hans Simmerl, the consultant commissioned by the local court of Straubing to assess Mollath's mental health during a trial pertaining to his guardianship/health care, conversed with him for several hours in 2007 and did not find any evidence of mental disorders;

> On 19 February 2013, Strate applied for a trial de novo based on evidence that the presiding judge had committed numerous instances of perversion of justice against Mollath in the case. According to Strate, the judge was responsible for Mollath's detention for almost three weeks without disclosure of the charges or presentation to a judge, failure to respond to Mollath's complaints or forward them to the higher court that should have decided them, manipulation of the court's composition, obvious misrepresentations in the reasons for the judgment, and unconscionable refusal to discharge Mollath's assigned counsel in spite of many petitions to do so, followed by use of said counsel as a witness against his own client.

> On 18 March 2013, in a very unusual move, the prosecution also applied for a trial de novo, based on exculpating evidence that had surfaced only after the original trial.

> Judge Otto Brixner had to admit before the committee that he hadn't read Mollath's written defense which he claimed to be irrelevant in his judgment. In June 2013 Mollath testified before the committee, repeating his claim that he wasn't allowed to give evidence during his trial.

> On 6 August 2013 the Oberlandesgericht Nuremberg (higher regional court) ordered the reopening of Mollath's case. He was released from mental hospital immediately. The court found that the medical certificate documenting the alleged abuse of his wife was a "fictitious document", because it appeared to be written and signed by Dr. Madeleine Reichel, who never had examined Mollath's wife. Instead the author of the report was her son, then a doctor in training.

> Mollath's 2018 action for damages by the unlawful custody has been concluded in November 2019 by an ex gratia payment of €600,000 by the defendant Free State of Bavaria.

> Ultimately, the court considered the aggravated assault proven, but fully acquitted him on the other charges citing insufficient proof. Criminal insanity was also considered unproven; Mollath was held in a psychiatric ward unlawfully and was entitled to a compensation. The acquittal from the first trial could not be overturned though, and Mollath was acquitted on all charges.

Re: Germany’s top financial supervisor dismissed a decade of warnings about Wirecard

#158
post #137
post #102

Earlier 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 is a small group of actors that benefits from these projects. The bribery part is hard to prove, I give you that, but it is very likely.

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 but they can be very well explained by incompetence rather than bribery.

Re: Germany’s top financial supervisor dismissed a decade of warnings about Wirecard

#159
post #26

> Sure, it's not like Russia or the CCP and you're not in danger of being suicided if you uncover some high level dirt You are not going to get disappered, but you are in danger of getting a fraudulent "psychiatric diagnosis" if you are a tax investigator uncovering dirt about some politicians or their cronies.[0][1] In this case the investigator got free, but I am sure there are some cases out there of people who di…

This is one of the things that has always concerned me about the idea of putting legal restrictions on people in the US based on mental health. The idea that a diagnosis could be assigned without any type of independent medical or blood test that can disproved it is frankly terrifying.

Re: Germany’s top financial supervisor dismissed a decade of warnings about Wirecard

#160

Germany also did not aggressively investigate Volkswagen for the emissions scandal. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-volkswagen-emissions-germ...

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand the fraud was aimed at US [particularly Californian] emissions regulations but not German/EU emissions regulations, which differed in such a way that cheating wasn't necessary for those engines to pass. The American emissions regulations were more concerned with nitrogen oxides than the EU regulations which emphasized fuel efficiency; Volkswagen found they couldn't satisfy both at the same time (or would make less money if they did?) so they chose to make efficient engines that produced a lot of nitrogen oxides, then use cheat software to evade the nitrogen oxide regulations in America.

If my understanding of that is correct, it doesn't surprise me that German authorities weren't very proactive about a German company defrauding the American government. It obviously disappoints me, but it doesn't surprise me.

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