He is currently a member of the investigations team, and his reporting on Wirecard was recognised with more than a dozen awards and prizes, including journalist of the year at the 2020 British Press Awards. Readers will meet the rich, the famous, the infamous, the powerful, and the powerless in the USA, England, Monaco, France, and Switzerland.

As always, I would be taking a nearly impenetrable file home with me, and the evening would not be my own. My father had worked all his life in the rag trade, as did so many other Jews who had come to England to escape persecution on the Continent. It was too early for me to have worldly knowledge, but I knew instinctively that he was the kind of man that every man should be. Named or unnamed, the true heroes of Money Men are the whistleblowers and short sellers who brought the scandal to light. Violent crimes fill books and streaming services with tales of psychopaths that cause stories that can barely be believed.

By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. McCrum was more responsible than anyone else for the exposure and eventual collapse of the hugely fraudulent payment company.

Money Men tells the story from inside Wirecard's headquarters with entertaining drama and verve, but it also unspools the high-stakes reporting process McCrum and his colleagues carried out at the Financial Times against the odds. It reads like a thriller as he painstakingly exposes the tissue of lies, false accounting and mythical acquisitions that lie behind the company's respectable facade. With McCrum at the epicentre of Wirecard’s downfall in 2019-20, you would only get a more detailed, thorough account of the whole story if it were written by the disgraced CEO Markus Braun and COO Jan Marsalek themselves. As McCrum acknowledges, without the help of roughly a dozen whistleblowers, the Wirecard fraud would never have come to light .

Or more often than not, lecturing other countries about "standards" and then not applying them to their own dealings.

In a short period of time, the business my father had worked to build his whole life would collapse and my parents would be ruined. I can't help comparing Money Men to Bad Blood, the story of the Theranos scandal by Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou. The older folks forked and spooned mounds of food onto their plates, and began digging in as though they might never see another meal.The dignity of the law courts and the wig and gown was on the other side of town, far away from the bins of dirty rags I had come here to manage. When in 2014, Dan McCrum, a bank analyst turned investigative journalist, received a tip about “German gangsters” running a company that advertised itself as the German PayPal, he could not have imagined that his reporting would allow him to expose the biggest corporate scandal in post-war Germany.

No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins.In the end, I'm left learning much more about how the Financial Times operates and the layout of their desks than I did about the inside of Wirecard. For a few minutes I followed her around the kitchen, talking excitedly as she offered me almond cookies and hazelnut treats before dinner. It is also a reminder of how markets and society at large stand to benefit from whistleblowers and short sellers. Some of the best parts of this book are when McCrum dives deep into the journalistic aspects of his investigation.