Very stinky indeed.

Wirecard’s meltdown raises questions not just for Braun, a former KPMG consultant, but for auditors at EY and financial analysts who allegedly failed to spot the warning signs.

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“Sheep who love a rising share price, just embarrassing.” That was the withering assessment of fawning analysts received by shortseller Barry Norris in a text message from a hedge fund friend during a 2018 presentation to Wirecard investors.
Norris, founder of Argonaut Capital, was one of the investors who bet that the company's share price would fall.
He claims management evaded investors who asked tough questions and that he felt he was being “blackballed” when the firm repeatedly cancelled meetings with him.
Before the full scale of the problems became clear last week, Norris said the company’s response to questions raised “more red flags than you would see at a communist rally”.
“It was an incredibly hard company to analyse because they just decided to disclose nothing apart from a sales number and a profit number.
“If you don’t give any information out, nobody can analyse it.”

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Felix Hufeld, head of Germany's financial regulator Bafin, admonished Wirecard’s management and EY this week for their role in the “complete disaster”.
Bafin also has questions to answer, he admitted. The watchdog is under fire for its ban on shortsellers betting against the country’s fintech success story and its accusations of market manipulation by journalists who raised allegations of misconduct.
“Wirecard’s close relationship with Bafin needs to be investigated,” Norris says. “In order to perpetuate the [alleged] deceit for such a long time, it’s impossible to think that Wirecard didn’t have influence in the regulatory body and in German politics.”

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Lenders may be reluctant to be seen to push the company over the edge by calling in their money but by failing to do so they are lending to a company that is being compared to US energy firm Enron, which was at the centre of a massive accounting scandal in 2001.
Wirecard’s shares will fall to zero and the firm will go bust once the banks call in their loans, Norris predicts.
Wirecard declined to comment.
The Wirecard warning signs investors chose to ignore