On June 25, 2020, after operating for more than two decades, the German payment processor Wirecard filed for insolvency, and made headlines with €1.9bn apparently missing from its books. However, the first cracks in the company’s facade began appearing much earlier. Already in 2008, the German Shareholders Association (Schutzgemeinschaft der Kapitalanleger) accused Wirecard of underreporting its balance sheets, with further inconsistencies examined in a series of articles by the Financial Times (FT) in 2015. In January 2019, the FT ran a story giving voice to a whistleblower who came forward with allegations of fraud at Wirecard, and ultimately triggered a chain of events resulting in its collapse a little over a year later.

In the aftermath, the spotlight turned on the German financial supervisory authority BaFin, which came under scrutiny due to its handling of the case. Not only did BaFin seemingly fail to act for a considerable time, but once it did take action, the decisions were seen as giving more credence to Wirecard than to the whistleblowers. In February 2019, the authority imposed a ban on short-selling of Wirecard shares, and in April 2019 filed a criminal complaint