The Wirecard scandal has made for an engrossing account of corporate failure since the news emerged that the German financial payments processing company had been inflating its accounts. Now that the company has collapsed – the first time that a member of the German Dax index has failed – the ramifications are starting to be revealed. The EU is now investigating the role played by BaFin , the German regulator tasked with regulating the company, whilst the FCA in the UK has ordered the British arm of the company to freeze all of their customers’ accounts . Now that the aftermath is continuing to fold, the focus is now rightly turning to why the alarm bells were not sounded earlier by those both paid and expected to do so.   Of particular concern has been the auditing conducted by Ernst & Young (EY), and the credit rating conducted by Moody’s. With investors standing to lose out considerably because of this collapse, the performance of these gatekeepers is a massively importan

The giant Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, a holding company that holds shares in Sprint, Alibaba, Uber, and many others, was recently downgraded by Moody’s dragging it further into ‘junk’ status. However, it has decided to take aim at this decision and has suggested that Moody’s has ‘ biased and mistaken views ’. Is this retaliation to Moody’s justified, or is it a company, and a CEO, under increasing pressure as its debts continue to build? SoftBank, founded in 1981 by Masayoshi Son (now CEO), went public in 1994 and was valued at $3 billion. Since then, it has gone on to become one of the world’s largest public companies, and Japan’s second largest behind Toyota. However, recently there have been concerns from the market that the company was exposing itself to too much debt, with the Financial Times reporting that SoftBank currently has $55 billion in net debt. It was on this basis, supposedly, that Moody’s took its recent decision to downgrade SoftBank’s credit rating by two