The white-collar fraud pandemic is as serious as Covid

Wirecard is the latest corporate scandal. The German company declared, last week, that it was unable to locate €1.9 billion of its bank deposits! Its stock price declined 99 per cent, dropping from €104 on June 7, to €2 on July 8, wiping out shareholders. The Wirecard fraud is eerily similar to Satyam. Set up in 1999, Wirecard became a payments processor to process credit card payments for online credit card transactions. It acquired a listed company, thereby obviating scrutiny to get its own listing and also acquired a bank in 2006 in Germany. Wirecard also used overseas subsidiaries to process the payments and apparently faked transactions, generating business volume (fake) as well as the...