Latest news with #Wirecard
Bloomberg
02-07-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Stablecoins Are Waking Up Wirecard-Scarred Germany
German financial regulator BaFin doesn't seem to be hyped up when it comes to stablecoins — blockchain-issued cryptocurrencies designed to mimic the dollar — whose potential in payments has whipped up enthusiasm on the stock market. After a first warning against a Frankfurt-based stablecoin issuer called Ethena, which BaFin accused of serious organizational shortcomings and breaches of European Union crypto rules, the regulator last week instructed it to wind up business. No doubt BaFin is trying to make up for the spectacular collapse of payments processor Wirecard AG five years ago, the biggest fraud in German history. Back then, BaFin was very much in a hyped-up mood, defending a national financial-technology darling instead of digging into whistleblower allegations about its operations that proved correct. The regulator's new boss has been cracking the whip since, and not just in stablecoins: Its 2023 pressure on France's Worldline SA for failing to take action against fraudsters is still reverberating today as the company faces a probe in Belgium over new allegations (though it has denied wrongdoing).
Bloomberg
27-06-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Five Years From Wirecard, Europe's Shorts Are Still Unloved
Short selling ought to have gotten easier in Europe since Wirecard AG filed for insolvency five years ago this week. The collapse spectacularly vindicated the Financial Times, which nailed the accounting scandal, and the hedge funds that had bet against the stock. But regulation continues to foster a bad environment for short sellers. Europe should beware of letting their craft die. The supervision of short selling gets more stringent as you move east from the US. One major issue is the disclosure of short positions. The US favors aggregating these for public consumption. The UK is moving toward the same model. But in the European Union, individual positions of 0.5% or more must be revealed.
Yomiuri Shimbun
07-06-2025
- Business
- Yomiuri Shimbun
Russian Officials Delight in Trump-Musk Rift, Offer Mediation, Asylum
Tom Brenner/For The Washington Post President Donald Trump holds a news conference with Elon Musk to mark the end of the Tesla CEO's tenure as a special government employee May 30. As President Donald Trump and the world's richest man blew up the internet by detonating their friendship, a key Kremlin point man on White House contacts used a phrase from the L.A. riots, a divisive moment in American history, to get in a dig. Posting on Elon Musk's platform X, close Putin ally Kirill Dmitriev used the famous Rodney King line to ask 'why can't we all just get along?' In Russia, as elsewhere, the internet was transfixed as Trump and Musk, the man who claimed he had gotten the president elected, traded threats and insults. Comments both wry and mocking flooded social media. As the brawl turned nastier, and Trump ally Stephen K. Bannon called for Musk to be deported as an illegal immigrant and for Trump to seize his company SpaceX, some Russian officials ironically suggested that Musk could seek asylum in Russia, joining the likes of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and Wirecard fugitive Jan Marsalek, who according to British prosecutors is a Russian spy. Dmitriev, the U.S.-sanctioned head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund who traveled to Washington in April to dine with Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, even asked Grok, the AI chatbot developed by Musk's xAI, what to do about the fight, seeming as eager as Fox News hosts to repair the rift. '@grok what needs to happen for @realDonaldTrump and @elonmusk to reconcile,' he posted. Grok suggested private talks and public apologies for personal attacks. 'However, their escalating conflict and public barbs suggest reconciliation is unlikely soon.' Russia's informal troller in chief Dmitry Medvedev, who held the presidency for Putin from 2008 to 2012 and is now deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, also chimed in on X with a horrified-face emoji. 'We are ready to facilitate the conclusion of a peace deal between D and E for a reasonable fee and to accept Starlink shares as payment. Don't fight, guys!' he posted Friday, referring to Musk's satellite internet network. But easily the most provocative offer came from Musk's onetime rival in spaceflight, Dmitry Rogozin, former head of Russia's space agency, Roscosmos. The two sparred publicly for years on Twitter. On Thursday, Rogozin, now an official in occupied Ukraine who heads a special technical military combat battalion, BARS-Sarmat, invited Musk to flee the United States and join in the war on Russia's side. 'Elon @elonmusk, don't be upset! You are respected in Russia. If you encounter insurmountable problems in the US, come to us and become one of us – a 'Bars-Sarmat' fighter,' he wrote on X. 'Here you will find reliable comrades and complete freedom of technical creativity.' The offer was echoed by the first deputy chairman of the international affairs committee of the lower house of parliament, Dmitry Novikov, who told the Tass state news agency that Russia could offer asylum to Musk 'if he needs it.' Beside the tsunami of bawdy memes, the Trump-Musk row exposed the ways in which America's political culture at times resembles aspects of Russia's: There were the open calls by Trump allies to probe a powerful oligarch, arrest and deport or seize his assets merely because he fell out with the president. There was Musk's claim that he was responsible for Trump's reelection, courtesy of his social media platform X and his vast political donations. Then there were Trump's threats to cut Musk's state contracts, worth billions, amid the dispute, and his comment that 'I've done a lot for him.' These evoke aspects of Putin's autocratic system of personalized patronage, which he uses to curb Russia's oligarchs and ensure total loyalty. On X, memes appeared comparing Musk to Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the Putin ally, oligarch and Wagner mercenary group founder who staged an aborted uprising in 2023 and whose plane later fell out of the sky due to an unexplained explosion, killing him and nine others, including top Wagner commanders. Some compared Musk to other Russian oligarchs who fell out with Putin over the years, including Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was jailed for 10 years before he was forced to leave Russia, and Boris Berezovsky, a media tycoon who fled Russia in 2000 and was found dead, apparently hanged, in his Berkshire, England, home in 2013, although the coroner returned an open verdict due to several anomalies. For years Musk, as an immigrant who became the world's richest man, has been a popular figure in Russia, attracting a large fan base and sparking ironic memes about tech-savvy ideas and even inspiring cocktails. In February 2021, Musk tagged the Kremlin on Twitter to ask for a meeting with President Vladimir Putin on the then-popular Clubhouse social media app. The result of that outreach is unknown, but in March 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine, Musk tagged the Kremlin calling for one-on-one combat with Putin to decide the war. 'I hereby challenge Vladimir Putin to single combat. Stakes are Ukraine,' wrote Musk. 'Do you agree to this fight?' he added in Russian. There was no known response. Musk strongly opposed military aid to Ukraine during the war and repeatedly accused Kyiv of corruption, although he did not carry out his 2022 threat to cut off Starlink satellite links that provide Ukraine's internet.
Time of India
03-06-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Irish fintech Nomupay gets $40 mln investment from SoftBank
Live Events Irish fintech Nomupay said on Tuesday it had received a $40 million investment from an unit of SoftBank Corp at a valuation of $290 million to help it expand in Asian countries such as started operations in 2021 after buying licences from payments company Wirecard, which collapsed a year earlier in Germany's biggest post-war fraud has since raised $120 million, with the last round of $37 million in January valuing it at $200 million."We will integrate the Japanese payment methods that are provided by SoftBank, which means the rest of the world can now access Japan, and then we will jointly expand into other markets," Nomupay CEO Peter Burridge told is a payment processor focusing on local and cross-border payments and operates in an industry dominated by the likes of Stripe and Adyen."We aim to be profitable by the end of the year," Burridge said.
CNA
02-06-2025
- Business
- CNA
German financial watchdog: AI is helping to catch market abuse
FRANKFURT :Germany's financial regulator BaFin is using artificial intelligence to help it spot market abuse and suspicious patterns in trading, increasing the chances of catching offenders, a top official warned on Monday. BaFin President Mark Branson said the supervisor had started using artificial intelligence last year in its alert and market analysis system. "We can already see from this that the results of this analysis system have become more accurate," Branson said at a conference. "The chances of being caught in market abuse trading have never been so high, and here in Germany we know that the penalties for this can also be considerably high," he warned. BaFin under Branson has been trying to burnish its reputation after the fall of Wirecard, a former blue-chip hailed as a German success story and once worth $28 billion. The supervisor failed to spot accounting fraud at Wirecard ahead of its collapse in 2020, resulting in an effort to give BaFin "more bite" with a change in top leadership and more powers to spot and investigate wrongdoing.
