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Tangled up in the toddler, but unearthed the almost unbelievable:
The Bundestag committee of inquiry into the accounting scandal at Wirecard
Photo: HANNIBAL HANSCHKE / REUTERS
You have once again outbid yourself: the parliamentarians on the Wirecard investigative committee spent around five hours interviewing a British stock exchange speculator at the end of last week.
It was one of her longest interviews with a witness.
The MPs have repeated and monologized, turned in circles and tangled in the small.
As so often.
The bottom line, however, was that they unearthed something incredible: That employees on the whistleblower hotline of the Bafin financial supervisory authority couldn't speak English as soon as the word Wirecard was mentioned.
That they hung up immediately when they heard the name of the Aschheim payment service provider.
That Germany's financial supervisors lacked the necessary feeling and understanding for fraudulent machinations and they fell for the most absurd stories.
It was another example of the remarkable work the MPs have done and their progress in coming to terms with the scandal.
The revealing aftermath of the Wirecard affair, which the parliamentarians have been directing since November, cannot compensate for the failure in the run-up to the fact that things went wrong on so many levels and that the financial center Germany appears provincial and underexposed.
Financial center Germany: Provincial and underexposed
Employees of the financial supervisory authority gambled with Wirecard shares, and the authority has now reported one for insider trading.
The head of the auditor supervision Apas also bought Wirecard stocks shortly before the collapse of the company.
A Commerzbank analyst who was supposed to deal with the group and its wondrous growth figures acted as an informant and supplied Wirecard with information from the critics' camp.
A supervisory board of Deutsche Bank ingratiated itself with the long-time Wirecard boss
Markus Braun
(51) and asked him to finish the British business newspaper "Financial Times", which repeatedly published critical stories about the company.
For years, EY auditors have been satisfied with evidence of billions in account balances from dubious sources instead of asking the banks directly where the money should actually be.
The wife of a chancellor's advisor apparently arranges Wirecard contacts with a Chinese company.
A former Bavarian police chief played the door opener to important authorities for the company and gave the driver of the former Wirecard CEO a gun license.
In the investigation committee, the ex-chief of police revealed a more than negligent handling of the truth.
Money laundering prevention did not take place in Bavaria for months because employees were assigned to corona crisis management.
In any case, they work in the department as they did before the Internet Stone Age, they have no registers with all the companies they are supposed to control - let alone training to find out more about the latest tricks.
Ignorance, incompetence and limitless sloppiness
It is a bunch of wild stories and a curious cabinet of small-minded characters that are made public by the committee of inquiry.
The MPs have been given access to hundreds of gigabytes of emails and logs, notes and faxes.
What they are fishing out there reveals in the most dazzling colors ignorance and incompetence, limitless sloppiness and a lack of honesty of the important actors who are supposed to control the financial center Germany.
The committee of inquiry makes it relentlessly clear: The history of Wirecard is also a history of the state failure.
The most absurd example of this is the third-rate robber's pistol, which the public prosecutor and financial regulator
Jan Marsalek
(40) bought in February 2019 and which led to the ban on short sales: Employees of the Bloomberg news agency had asked Wirecard for six million euros by phone, otherwise Bloomberg would be "an offer from the Financial Times accept "and get into the negative coverage of Wirecard, from which Bloomberg had expected financial benefits.
Huh ?!
Really now?
The public prosecutor's office faxed the information to Bafin without checking.
And that, in turn, has temporarily banned speculation in Wirecard shares on this basis - which was received by investors, journalists and other supervisors as the ultimate vote of confidence.
The Bafin will only resort to such drastic means if it has clear, unambiguous evidence of Wirecard's innocence, won't it?
It is probably one incident too many that ultimately
cost
Bafin boss
Felix Hufeld
(59) and Bafin director
Elisabeth Roegele
(53), the architect of the short sale ban, the job.
They are adding to the list of those who have lost their job, reputation or bonus because of Wirecard.
And the committee of inquiry is far from finished with its work.
They'll keep digging until summer.
Better pay for good people
more on the subject
Personnel consequences: Wirecard scandal also costs Bafin Vice Roegele the job
Public prosecutor before Wirecard investigation committee: "We were always in the starting blocks" Katharina Slodczyk reports from Berlin
Matthew Earl before Wirecard investigative committee: "Public enemy number one" - how a short seller failed at Wirecard Katharina Slodczyk reports from Berlin
The chronicle of the last few days: Was the Wirecard bankruptcy really compelling? By Katharina Slodczyk
Late reaction: Bafin reports employees to Wirecard for insider trading
The Federal Ministry of Finance now promises full-bodied a new start in the financial supervision after the resignations at the top of the Bafin.
But that will not be enough to avoid scandals like Wirecard.
Above all, it will take more money - investing in better equipment, in training, in more attractive pay, so that the jobs at regulators will attract more good people from the field.
The problems are much deeper than that.
It is an attitude of mind, a general aversion to short sellers and speculators, whose knowledge could have been used at Wirecard, against the Anglo-Saxon capital market.
As a result, Germany is also far from the standards there in the fight against the excesses, which have long since arrived here.
Wirecard has been able - and the shortsellers have provided convincing evidence for this - to use tricks and deceive government agencies since it was founded a good two decades ago.
It should take at least as long to overcome this.