Money Men: A Hot Startup, A Billion Dollar Fraud, A Fight for the Truth

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There is a lot of entertainment value in the approach of the author, Dan McCrum, but in terms of company-collapse books gets a 3. The Money Man is a story of determination, love, and faith that includes many page turning stories of extraordinary success and dismal failure. The narrative is a slow burn, which is understandable from pulling all the threads of a massive investigation together, and the many setbacks endured.

Outside the office, in the sorting area, a dozen or more men and women in scruffy clothes were weighing and bundling mountains of rags. That evening, everyone was gathered at Grandfather’s house — his children and the sons and daughters in law, like a Friday night, but all the family looked very glum. Helpfully, there is quite literally a cast of characters that McCrum prefaces the book with, laying out the many spies, short-sellers and ‘bandits’ involved. My mother tugged me by the sleeve, away from dad’s bedside in the Intensive Care Unit and out into the waiting area.

There's a perfect example of this early in Money Men: A Hot Start-Up, a Billion-Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Future, when its author, the Financial Times journalist Dan McCrum, is ingesting lessons in fraud detection from hedge fund investor Leo Perry. I bowed my head, waiting for him to begin, not so much tuned to the words as to the man who was about to speak them. I enjoyed this book for the story, Dan McCrum does a great job of narrating the insanity of his experience uncovering the Wirecard fraud in excruciating detail.

I read some of McCrum's articles before the house of cards collapsed and was surprised at the time that sophisticated investors thought that the company was correctly valued.McCrum structures this sprawling and complicated narrative by alternating between the history of Wirecard he has unearthed through interviews and documents, and the personal story of his investigations into the company. I can't help comparing Money Men to Bad Blood, the story of the Theranos scandal by Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou. As McCrum’s tour casts light into the shadowed recesses, he shows how paper moon shysters and brutish thuggery are by no means relegated to organised crime. They had escaped from a world of poverty and lack in Europe, a place of insecurity, and now they were in a place of plenty.

If Dad’s business folded, they’d be forced out onto the streets to show it around the district, struggling to find jobs. McCrum (with backing from the Financial Times) admirably pursues his quarry until steadfast short-sellers are finally vindicated: the scales fall from investors’ eyes and agencies are shaken awake from their regulatory slumber. We at Penguin Random House Australia acknowledge that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the Traditional Custodians and the first storytellers of the lands on which we live and work.There were so many boring threads the author pulled on and then left the most exciting ones unexplained.