Angela Merkel defends lobbying for disgraced Wirecard
Ben Knight, 23 April 2021
The German chancellor has appeared at a parliamentary inquiry to defend her decision to lobby on behalf of the disgraced banking firm Wirecard in China. The scandal is one of Germany’s biggest ever fraud cases.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has told the German Bundestag that there was no reason to believe that Wirecard was committing fraud in 2019, when she lobbied on behalf of the now insolvent Bavarian company during an official trip to China.
“Despite the press reports, there was no reason to assume there were serious irregularities at Wirecard at the time,” she told a parliamentary inquiry during a hearing on Friday. Continue reading “Article: Angela Merkel defends lobbying for disgraced Wirecard”
In February 2019, after a steep drop in Wirecard’s share price, German authorities launched criminal probes into short-sellers and journalists who had accused the company of fraud, and banned investors from betting against the company.
Having the collateral to cover stock trading is important to oil the market cogs. With margin trading, it is critical, a lesson learned the hard way from “Bill” Hwang last month. From today, the SEC will decide which brokerages failed to cover their securities trading, and what punishments it will dish out.
Samsung Electronics chief Lee Jae-yong on Thursday denied all charges leveled against him during his first trial hearing on alleged irregularities surrounding his ascension to the helm of Samsung Group.
America’s decision to place India on its currency manipulator’s watchlist is ludicrous. The US Fed’s policy of keeping interest rates ultra-low, along with America’s allies in Europe and Japan, is responsible for both the dollar’s plunge and surging flows of capital to emerging markets, like India, in search of reasonable returns. These capital inflows make the rupee appreciate out of line with real economy concerns. Seen from India’s perspective, the US should be pointing fingers at itself when it comes to currency manipulation.
Vanita Gupta was fresh out of law school when she heard about what happened in Tulia, Texas. Two years earlier, in 1999, nearly half of the town’s adult Black population was rounded up in a drug sting on the word of a single undercover cop, accused of selling him small amounts of cocaine. Several convictions swiftly followed, accompanied by sentences of up to 361 years. The remaining defendants, 43 of whom were people of color, started pleading guilty.
The Bank of England might strengthen its controls on cloud data providers and other technology firms to counter possible risks to the stability of the financial system from the rise of fintech, Deputy Governor Dave Ramsden said.
Britain will crack down on online scams and make platforms that make money from advertising financial products more accountable, financial services minister John Glen said on Wednesday.