Wirecard AG shares continued their free fall after the two Asian banks that were supposed to be holding 1.9 billion euros (US$2.13 billion) of missing cash denied any business relationship with the German payments company.
Wirecard now faces a potential cash crunch.
The company on Thursday warned that loans up to 2 billion euros could be terminated if its audited annual report was not published yesterday.
Photo: Reuters
Analysts at Morgan Stanley estimated that Wirecard has available cash of about 220 million euros, if it cannot locate the missing money.
BDO Unibank Inc, the Philippines’ largest bank by assets, and the Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) yesterday said in separate statements that Wirecard is not a client.
“It was a rogue employee who falsified documents and forged the signatures of our officers,” BDO Unibank CEO Nestor Tan said in a mobile phone message. “Wirecard is not even a depositor — we have no relationship with them.”
BPI said it continues to investigate the issue.
Wirecard shares plunged 24 percent at 9:11am in Frankfurt yesterday, taking the stock’s losses to 71 percent since Wednesday’s close.
The company that was worth 24.6 billion euros in September 2018 when it entered Germany’s DAX index is valued at about 3.4 billion euros.
The denials from BDO and BPI follow a Wirecard statement on Thursday, which claimed that auditor Ernst & Young could not confirm the location of the missing cash that was supposed to be held in Asian banks and reported that “spurious balance confirmations” had been provided.
BDO has reported the Wirecard issue to Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the Philippines central bank, Tan said.
The crisis has engulfed Wirecard, which has suffered one of the worst stock slumps in the history of Germany’s benchmark index after warning that as much as 2 billion euros in loans could be called due if its audited annual report, delayed for the fourth time, was not published yesterday.
Wirecard spokespeople did not immediately return calls and e-mails for comment.
Wirecard CEO Markus Braun has painted the company as a potential victim.
Braun has been resisting calls to resign and aggressively defending the company against accusations of accounting fraud, led by a series of articles in the Financial Times.
“It cannot be ruled out that Wirecard has been the victim in a substantial case of fraud,” Braun said in a statement.
The company temporarily suspended outgoing chief operating officer Jan Marsalek, it said in a statement late on Thursday.
Marsalek — who has been suspended on a revocable basis until June 30 — had tried to get in touch with the two Asian banks and trustees over the past two days to recover the missing money, but was not successful, a person familiar with the matter said.
It is unclear if the funds can be recovered, the person added.
“Given the magnitude of the cash balances in question, new creditor risks and severity of the share price drop, we believe these board changes are unlikely to be enough to restore market confidence in the near term,” Citigroup analyst Robert Lamb said in a note yesterday.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day