The Wirecard Hunter returns

Erschienen im Politico Newsletter:

THE WIRECARD HUNTER RETURNS: Fabio De Masi made his name as one of the key players in Germany’s Bundestag that helped hold Wirecard to account after the high-flying fintech company was revealed to be engaging in fraud on a massive scale. Now De Masi, who already served once as MEP in 2014, is back in Brussels. He’s sitting in the ECON committee and he thinks that there’s plenty more financial malfeasance to dig up.

Change of flag: During his first stint in the European Parliament, De Masi was part of the Left group. Since then, he’s joined his boss Sahra Wagenknecht to form a breakaway party that collected a respectable six percent of the German vote in European Elections. The new political force, the Sahra Wagenknecht Union, can be crudely described as left on the economy but somewhat more to the right on social issues — for example expressing skepticism towards migration.

Leftism, classic: “I think what we are trying to do… maybe a couple of years ago, some people would have said that was a classical Social Democratic position,” De Masi told MFS. He added that the party has a strong focus on promoting the economic wellbeing of everyday people, favoring large-scale investment and industrial policy, but skeptical, for example, of phasing out the internal combustion engine, saying this threatened the livelihood of automotive workers. Think less crunchy granola and rainbow flags, more oiled up proletarians.

Welcome to the (fintech) jungle: Returning to Wirecard, De Masi said the case wasn’t just about one isolated bad egg. It was about “a geopolitical conflict about who controls the flows of payment in the digital age” (in the case of Wirecard, there’s been proven links to Russian intelligence.) A large part of FinTech and crypto, said De Masi, was devoted to circumventing traditional banks — opening up channels for everything from money laundering to sanctions evasion.

There’s a Brussels-connection here too. “Think of Eva Kaili,” said De Masi, recalling how she was given an award for her work on ‘new technologies.’ Before becoming one of the protagonists of the Qatargate scandal, the MEP made a name for herself as one of the biggest proponents of crypto in Brussels.

Stay tuned: Right now, the main obstacle for De Masi is that he, and the five other MEPs in his party, are not part of a political group, belonging to the politically irrelevant ‘non inscrits’. That, however, may change. De Masi said he’s in talks with a number of MEPs who are potentially interested in forming a new political group. The odds? “Currently, I would see it 80:20.”