Money Men: A Hot Startup, A Billion Dollar Fraud, A Fight for the Truth

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All in all, not a completely inaccessible book about a financial start-up, but just not quite able to grab me all the way through. When he first voiced his concerns, however, Perry quickly became the target of a sophisticated campaign of intimidation aimed at discrediting him. Violent crimes fill books and streaming services with tales of psychopaths that cause stories that can barely be believed. Readers will meet the rich, the famous, the infamous, the powerful, and the powerless in the USA, England, Monaco, France, and Switzerland.

Which meant they bought old rags, sorted them into grades and sold them to cloth merchants for recycling. A sceptical reader couldn’t help but wonder if the wilful ignorance towards Wirecard’s flagrant fraud was partially born from the EUs tragic desperation for a home-grown technology MNC. There he sat, full of patience and grace, listening to an uncle’s complaint or tale of woe, no doubt offering a word of comfort, wisdom, insight drawn from those times upstairs alone with God. McCrum’s book Money Men therefore largely focuses on the role of short sellers who spent years trying to expose Wirecard’s lies and proved to be an invaluable source of information. Taking advantage of every loophole that ever existed and relying on businesses across Asia that didn't have the regulation that the Western world has, they ponzi schemed their way to a 20 billion dollar evaluation.

Again and again I pushed these feelings and thoughts away, as my attention became more focused on what the files revealed.

I think there is an element of Anglo-pride which comes through this book and a somewhat disdainful treatment of the German corporate class which while warranted from Dan McCrum's perspective is not entirely fair for the broader German business class. This book details the lengths to which people within the company Wire card went to hide evidence of fraud, and the efforts of one journalist to uncover it. With effort, he reached out and took his electric razor from the side of the bed and asked me if I would shave him. The great Moses Maimonides said, grandfather intoned, quoting the 12th-Century teacher of the Torah, "‘If I am not for me, then who is for me? I enjoyed this book for the story, Dan McCrum does a great job of narrating the insanity of his experience uncovering the Wirecard fraud in excruciating detail.Equally interesting was McCrum's depiction of the heady and tight-knit world of the billionaire ecosystem. Though I’d learned finesse as a good Brit, I had learned to direct my drive and energy into my work like a train at full-bore. When in 2014, Dan McCrum, a bank analyst turned investigative journalist, received a tip about “German gangsters” running a company that advertised itself as the German PayPal, he could not have imagined that his reporting would allow him to expose the biggest corporate scandal in post-war Germany.