Hidden as a orthodox priest!<p><i>"Then came June 2020, when, in the midst of an audit, Wirecard could not locate €1.9 billion in assets it claimed were being held somewhere in the world"</i><p>EY audited them for years without asking about the missing billions.
Are there other news sites carrying this?<p>The stories about the threats against the journalist Dan McCrum who was investigating Wirecard between 2014 and 2020 are mental.<p>I've just checked and McCrum has shared this link as well on Twitter so I count that as a reason to trust it.
Not a surprise considering what Citizen Lab found out.<p><a href="https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/79/" rel="nofollow">https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/79/</a>
delusions of grandeur strongly remind me of Paul LeRoux <a href="https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind/" rel="nofollow">https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind/</a><p>... also Kim Dotcom who I met personally before going on a run to Asia. He too had cardboard cutouts of himself as a cartoon character all over his Munich office of DataProtect. Funny that Kim Schmitz managed to settle in NZ and not Russia. He is an outlier, probably lacked the RU connection back then.
The Netflix documentary [1] on the Wirecard scandal [2] is great.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21836620/" rel="nofollow">https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21836620/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard_scandal" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirecard_scandal</a>
Interestingly, the article completely avoids mentioning the familial trail:<p>> Marsalek's grandfather, [Hans Maršálek](<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Mar%C5%A1%C3%A1lek" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Mar%C5%A1%C3%A1lek</a>), was a member of the Austrian resistance and later a suspected spy for the Soviet Union.<p>And following the link to Hans Maršálek's page:<p>> He was long suspected of being a Soviet asset. Recently uncovered documents indicate that are grounds to believe he was responsible for helping the Soviets kidnap at least four people and illegally render them to Moscow for torture and interrogation.<p>While I am not surprised that a socialist persecuted under the Nazis would join Soviet efforts, this is some useful backstory in understanding why Marsalek the younger apparently had no reserves in collaborating with the KGB.
Reading this reporting (Christo Grozev == quality always) reminds me of the experience reading of The Sword and the Shield by Christopher, MI5 historian (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitrokhin_Archive" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitrokhin_Archive</a>) and just shaking my head at the complex web of money, ideas, and corruption spun and counterspun by various spy agencies. The Archive blew up stuff dating back to tsarist Russia, and exposed some brilliant operation, and tons more pedestrian money-grabbing. These days with OSINT the exposure of it no longer relies on someone sneaking out paper in huge milk jugs and suitcases like Mitrokhin did.<p>And as a russian who came to states as a refugee it also boils my blood to see how much my former homeland is stirring the pots and slinging sh*t around the world and how many people can be bought. It is all going to end in a huge explosion 1917 style and a disaster for
so many.
>By this point, Wirecard’s client list included Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office, giving Marsalek — and the Russian intelligence services — access to sensitive data about German law enforcement’s slate of confidential informants.<p>that is a breach on a Hanssen level
Everytime crypto gets harangued as a money laundering cesspool, I think of HSBC’s highest performing branch in Sinaloa and Germany’s fintech giant payment processor run by a GRU spy. As in two money laundering behemoths right out in the regulated open. Give me a break.
With Schulz's truly strange behavior in stalling support for Ukraine, and involvement in the Wirecard and cum-ex scandals, I truly wonder if there might be some kompromat hanging over Scholz's head around this.
> Then as now, the internet’s truly big business came from revenues connected to gambling and pornography<p>This is an idea you hear quite often, but seems very unlikely to be actually true. Internet's truly big businesses are the truly big businesses of the big tech companies
Is there a word that describes a very loosely organized but extremely powerful entity, that is kind of a nation state but also kind of a mafia and also kind of a business? Can it just be summarized as Putin's regime? But then it will function without him, maybe even more effectively. And its only ideology is the hate toward Western values (and love of the Western toys). What you call it?
What was in it for Russia?<p>The missing 1.9 billions would be an interesting asset for e.g. NK secret services, but for Russia it's a drop in a bucket.
It's not the first story like this and not the last.<p>Right now there is still NASDAQ traded "Freedom Holding Corp" (FRHC) originated from Kazahstan with primary business of fueling sanctioned Russian money and doing other shady business in ex-USSR. Everyone knows they mass open accounts for Russia residents remotely and no one cares.<p>It's not like there are no other banks doing the same, but none of them are owned by US-based entity traded on NASDAQ. SEC certainly wont care until it implode on thousands of retail investors. Going after crypto is far more important.<p>And there are more financial institutions that have banking licenses around the globe (including US, EU and UK) with primary source of income from money laundering and again no one cares until they grow too big or scam all their customers and investors.
> The CEO of the company was Markus Braun, a former KPMG consultant from a middle-class family in Vienna. Braun modeled his appearance on Steve Jobs, always wearing a black turtleneck and wire-frame eyeglasses<p>Didn't Elizabeth Holmes do that too?<p>Never trust people who consciously dress like Steve Jobs on days other than Halloween.
Meanwhile:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39560440">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39560440</a><p>Entities like PayPal and Stripe are complaining they want <i>less</i> EU banking regulation.
This is what actual reporting looks like.<p>Look at most news stories these days. There's some kind of conflict, two parties don't agree on something, and they report both "sides" of the story. Because the writers don't know what really occurred, it's common that a news story will give equal weight to lies and truth (or semi-truth and semi-truth).<p>In the insanity of normal society, this is actually promoted as a good thing. News stations pat themselves on the back for being "fair and balanced", and use it as proof of being "unbiased".<p>It's the opposite of unbiased, when there's no bias there are no "sides". You can't take both sides in a conflict, each "side" being a heavily biased opinion in itself, and combine them together to create a lack of bias. That's not how it works, two conflicting partial truths don't equal a whole truth, two conflicting partial truths just create cognitive dissonance (FUD).<p>Now look at this news story, it's quite different from what I described above. It's proper investigative journalism where the goal is cutting through opinions and second-hand information to find the actual truth. It's a major accomplishment and something to be applauded.<p>In my heavily-biased opinion, it's the job of a free press to seek and report the truth, to create new stories like this one, not to report "both sides".<p>And to illustrate when I'm saying, look at what happens to be the #1 story on my Google News at this moment: <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/29/middleeast/gaza-food-truck-deaths-israel-wwk-intl/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/29/middleeast/gaza-food-truck-de...</a><p>CNN doesn't know exactly what happened, there's conflicting stories, and all we know for sure is that a bunch of hungry Palestinians were just killed while trying to get food. Here's what CNN found:<p>According to Palestine it's Israel's fault.<p>According to Israel it's Palestine's fault.<p>Yes, clear as mud. It's the perfect kind of reporting for adding to the controversy and acting like there's no clear right & wrong, or viable solutions to the conflict. It's how I would do things if I wanted to extend the war as long as possible. However, I'm biased toward peace and preservation of life, so it's quite clear to me what's causing food riots and subsequent massacres.
German (sp/h)ygh society, it's almost like any longterm spywar breeds a mafia, they are loyal first to themselves and their thiefdoms everywhere.
The UK has just concluded its investigation into “steakknife” - an IRA killer who was also working for British army and killed people on both sides seemingly with impunity.<p>I am guessing there is a mental hurdle in committing larger and larger crimes, but having “permission” from a government spy agency probably makes such things easier.<p>It’s ok to commit this crime - I have permission so it’s not really a crime.<p>The point is, no-one sees themselves as the bad guy.
Interesting story - sounds like Wirecard may have been a Russian version of the BCCI. For comparison:<p><a href="https://irp.fas.org/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/11intel.htm" rel="nofollow">https://irp.fas.org/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/11intel.htm</a><p>> "The unofficial story of BCCI's links to U.S. intelligence is complicated by the inability of investigators to determine whether private persons affiliated with U.S. intelligence were undertaking actions such as selling U.S. arms to a foreign government outside ordinary channels on their own behalf, or ostensibly under sanction of a U.S. government agency, policy, or operation."