The chaos at Germany's financial regulators

On the Wirecard report released by Germany's Bundestag.

Dear Reader,

The Bundestag’s special committee which was set up to investigate the Wirecard fraud published its final report this week - or I should say final reports.

With the six parties unable to agree on their conclusions, we were given three separate versions - one backed by the CDU and SPD, one backed by the FDP, Greens and Linke, and yet another from the AfD.

The coalition partners have published a watered-down version that protects SPD Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, whose ministry oversees financial regulator BaFin, and CDU Economy Minister Peter Altmaier.

I’m presuming no one has actually read the AfD one. That said, the committee was actually led by an AfD MdB and it has been widely praised for its diligence in piecing all the evidence together in just nine months.

The version that seems most likely to be both competent and rigorous though, is the one produced by the Greens, FDP and Die Linke.

Their report is close to 700 pages long - I’m not going to pretend to have read more tha…