Thursday, August 6, 2020

"FT reporters who broke Wirecard story sign with agency"

I smell Oscar!

From Deadline:
WME Signs Wirecard Investigative Journalists Dan McCrum And Paul Murphy
Dan McCrum and Paul Murphy, the Financial Times journalists who investigated and revealed the explosive Wirecard scandal, have signed with WME in all areas. The agency will represent them across film, television, books and podcasts.

Murphy oversaw the five-year investigation into the German fintech company, with McCrum serving as the lead reporter. Through their findings, McCrum and Murphy exposed the biggest accounting fraud case since Enron.

At one time valued at $25B, the German company became a darling of the financial world through its claim that it would end the use of cash through digitizing payments. McCrum and Murphy revealed a very different business, built upon a network of fraudulent activity, including inflating sales, deals with money launderers, and misleading its auditor about 1.9B Euros that went “missing,” according to the company....
....MORE

Headline from and HT to: Talking Biz News

See also June 27's:

Wirecard, The Movie: The FT's Dan McCrum Potrays A Man Pushed To The Brink By Teutonic Treachery
From the Financial Times:
I mean to begin with it was hard to believe. You have a sense of the Financial Times as a reputed organisation. And you're very publicly being called a criminal. I was sort of used to it when the company had done it, because the company had done it for years.

But when you suddenly find yourself facing an actual criminal investigation in Germany, with regulators where the company which you're writing about seems to have certainly the ear of these people, that was - there were some moments where it was quite stressful. You do at times start to think that you're going a little bit mad.

Because obviously you become paranoid. If you constantly think your emails are going to be hacked, or if you think people are following you. There was a period where I started to double back when I was going to meet people, or you would get on a Tube carriage, and jump off again, which seems ridiculous.

And it seemed ridiculous at the time. We were very conscious that there was active surveillance going on. So you start to doubt yourself. And when you try and explain this to anyone as well, like yes, I'm trying to report on the company. And all this crazy stuff is happening.

Even now I think about it, it sounds ridiculous. Like, some sort of film. My name is Dan McCrum. I'm a member of the investigations team at the Financial Times. Wirecard was pretty much a little known technology company. Barely anyone had heard of it, and even fewer people really understood what it did....
....MUCH MORE

Click through for the video and the rest of the transcript.

"Taut, Gripping"
—Investigations Illustrated
.
"Makes Hitchcock look like a community college project"
—Madness Monthly
.
"His Most Challenging Role Yet,
In comparison Lear and Hamlet were the picture of mental health"
—Phantasmagoria