Wirecard forged client data and lied about internal records to secure a €900m investment from SoftBank, according to details with German prosecutors.Wirecard forged client data and lied about internal records to secure a €900 million investment from SoftBank that was seen as a vote of confidence in the German payments group after the Financial Times started to raise questions about its business in 2019.
The SoftBank investment in Wirecard convertible bonds was announced in April 2019 and was followed by the sale of a €500 million bond to other investors. The funds helped keep Wirecard’s heavily cash-burning operations afloat. Mr Braun initially turned down this request, arguing it was confidential business data, the people said. As a compromise, Mr Braun and Akshay Naheta, then a senior executive at the tech investor, agreed that SoftBank representatives could look at the client data on a computer in Wirecard’s headquarters in Munich.
The deception, which has not previously been reported, preceded a much larger effort to forge transaction data by Mr Marsalek and others during a special audit by KPMG in the final months before Wirecard’s collapse.