“You hit publish, then you almost throw up,” says Paul Murphy, a Financial Times colleague of Dan McCrum, at a crucial stage in their investigation of Wirecard. The company was once a $30 billion tech-startup unicorn, only to be exposed as a financial fraud by hard running and long-game journalism that’s at the heart of Money Men.
In 2009 Wirecard’s market capitalization was €325 million - by 2014 it was €3.7 billion. Within a few years it had come from nowhere to overtake financial institutions like Deutsche Bank. “Wirecard had raised billions of euros as Europe’s answer to PayPal,” writes McCrum, “a payment processing company poised to take a cut in the trillions of dollars of online payments made every year.” And yet McCrum was tipped off to look into the company, as all was not as it seemed.
McCrum is part of the FT investigations team, and in 2020 he was named Journalist of the Year at the British Journalism Awards with his Wirecard scoop. ‘Money Men’ explains everything - seven years of complex, gripping journalism, creating a thrilling, head-spinning book entailing billion dollar fraud, fake offices, fake bank accounts, and some characters shadier than an Etch A Sketch.
McCrum wastes no time by embedding the reader at the centre of the FT’s newsroom. From there, he documents the unexceptional origins of Wirecard in Germany and the company’s ensuing rapid global growth (including a Dublin office). As Wirecard’s money miracle glows brighter, McCrum wonders how a company is reporting both huge growth and record profits?
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The narrative is a slow burn, which is understandable from pulling all the threads of a massive investigation together, and the many setbacks endured. But McCrum writes so you feel you are stepping with him all the way, as he and his FT colleagues scramble around the world chasing leads and evidence. Self depreciation is never far away either, which helps alongside all those working lunches. Money Men hugely rewards the reader when you get to the scoop alongside McCrum — you are close to punching the air — and it has the novelty of the decent guys winning for a change in the bullish billionaires arena. A fine testament to the importance of quality journalism, and the work that goes into it.
