With McKinsey's help, Wirecard hatched a plan to acquire Deutsche Bank, offering the German FinTech the prospect of a miraculous exit from the massive fraud it had been perpetrating.
By blending Wirecard's business into Deutsche's vast balance sheet, it hoped it could be possible to "somehow hide the missing cash and explain it away later in post-merger impairment charges."
There was one catch. To even start preparing such a deal in earnest, the company needed to get a clean bill of health from KPMG, which was conducting a special audit of Wirecard's books.
The approval from KPMG never came.
Six months later the curtain fell on Wirecard. On June 25, the group collapsed into insolvency after it was exposed as one of Germany's biggest postwar accounting frauds. Prosecutors in Munich suspect that €3.2bn in debt raised since 2015 has been "lost". Around €1bn was handed out in unsecured loans to opaque business partners in Asia.
