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German Chancellor Angela Merkel has defended her lobby Phone card in China in 2019, saying there was “no reason to assume” at the time that there were serious irregularities in the fraudulent payment company.
Merkel was talking to one Consult the Bundestag investigating how German financial politicians and regulators were unable to detect one of the worst cases of fraud in postwar German history. Merkel’s testimony is the culmination of a six-month investigation.
In his initial statement, he said his government regularly lobbied for the economic interests of German companies abroad and that Wirecard was no exception. But he denied that Wirecard had enjoyed “special treatment” on the visit to China. “The fact that [it] it was argued in China it had its logic, ”he said.
“Despite all the press reports, there was no reason at the time to assume that there were serious irregularities in Wirecard,” he said. He insisted he had not followed either the company’s “negative or positive” press coverage, but said there were a lot of people who thought at the time that Wirecard was a “really great tech company.”
But opposition MPs said given the volume of critical reports in 2019, the chancellor should have moved away from Wirecard. Merkel “was not covered in glory,” said Danyal Bayaz of the Greens. “It promoted the interests of a criminal enterprise in China.”
At the time of Merkel’s trip to China, Wirecard was trying to enter China by acquiring the Chinese payments company AllScore Financial. To seal the deal required the approval of the Chinese regulator, the People’s Bank of China. Merkel raised the issue with her Chinese interlocutors during her trip.
He said Wirecard’s push to enter the Chinese market “adjusted” Berlin’s strategy of trying to open up the Chinese financial services sector.
Wirecard announced last June that € 1.9 billion was missing from its accounts and soon collapsed into insolvency. Munich prosecutors accuse its former executive, Markus Braun, of running a criminal racket that committed “fraud in billions.” Braun, who has been in police custody since last summer, denies the offenses.
Merkel said the Wirecard affair was a “slap in the face to hundreds and thousands of honest businessmen” in Germany.
He was speaking to MPs a day after Finance Minister Olaf Scholz appeared before the investigation. He has been subjected to special scrutiny over his role as supervisor of financial regulator BaFin, which has been criticized for not processing Wirecard and for prosecuting journalists and short-term FT marketers who discovered irregularities in accounting practices. the company.
In their interrogation of Merkel, MPs focused on a meeting she held with her former Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, now chairman of the consultancy Spitzberg Partners, on 3 September 2019, a few days before the trip to China. Guttenberg, who was advising Wirecard at the time, began his acquisition of AllScore Financial and asked the chancellor for help.
Merkel said she did not remember Wirecard being mentioned at the meeting. He said he had forwarded the matter to experts in the chancellery’s economic department, led by his senior adviser, Lars-Hendrik Röller.
Merkel defended her decision to meet with Guttenberg, saying she accepted requests for personal meetings from former government ministers as “natural.”
But in question, she expressed frustration with the conversation and said she “doesn’t especially appreciate it” when former colleagues use personal conversations with her to “make certain requests.”
“We need strict and clear rules to avoid situations in the future in which chancellors are recruited for lobbying interests,” said Bayaz, the Green MP.
Röller has also been the subject of an examination by an email which according to deputies showed that his wife had tried to establish business contacts for Wirecard in China. Merkel said she had no reason to doubt Röller’s “loyalty and integrity.”
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