The ex-boss of scandal-hit payments firm Wirecard has been arrested in Germany.<\/p>\n
Markus Braun resigned last Friday after auditor EY refused to sign off the firm’s 2019 accounts over a missing \u20ac1.9bn (\u00a31.7bn).<\/p>\n
The money accounts for about a quarter of the firm’s total balance sheet.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors accuse Mr Braun of inflating Wirecard’s finances to make it appear healthier to investors and customers.<\/p>\n
Mr Braun reported himself to Munich prosecutors on Monday evening after a judge issued an arrest warrant against the 50-year old.<\/p>\n
The missing \u20ac1.9bn was supposedly held in accounts at two Asian banks and had been set aside for “risk management”, Wirecard had said.<\/p>\n
But EY said after an audit of the business that banks had been unable to provide the account numbers for where the money was held.<\/p>\n
On Monday, Wirecard admitted the \u20ac1.9bn simply may not exist.<\/p>\n
The German company also said it was withdrawing its financial results for 2019 and the first quarter of 2020.<\/p>\n
“The management board of Wirecard assesses on the basis of further examination that there is a prevailing likelihood that the bank trust account balances in the amount of 1.9 billion EUR do not exist,” the company said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Mr Braun had been in charge of the German fin-tech firm since 2002.<\/p>\n
When Wirecard joined Germany’s blue-chip Dax 30 share index two years ago it was valued at \u20ac24bn. But the company’s shares have crashed more than 80% in recent days giving it a stock market valuation of less than \u20ac3bn.<\/p>\n
The scandal at the firm emerged after a series of articles in the Financial Times last year focusing on alleged accounting irregularities in Wirecard’s Asian operations.<\/p>\n
Source: bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"