Wirecard shares tumble further after Braun stake sale

Markus Braun, who turned himself in to police on Monday, sold half his shares in Wirecard on Thursday and Friday according to regulatory filings. The sale leaves him with a 3% stake in the German company worth about $60m (£48m), Bloomberg reported.

Braun pledged Wirecard shares to Deutsche Bank in December 2017 as collateral for a €150m (£135m) credit line, since offloaded rapidly by Deutsche Bank. After Wirecard revealed the disappearance of €1.9bn the value of Braun's shares plunged, triggering a margin call, which required him to sell shares to pay money to his lenders.

His Wirecard stake was worth €1bn in mid-June but the shares have lost almost 90% of their value after no trace was found of the €1.9bn, which made up a quarter of Wirecard's balance sheet and was meant to have been held in accounts at Asian banks.

Wirecard shares fell 19% to €13.88 at 10:41 BST. The Financial Times reported that Braun originally pledged 4.2m shares to get the loan from Deutsche, suggesting he had to pay a margin call at some point earlier and that Wirecard did not inform the market.

The revelation by Wirecard's auditor Ernst & Young that it could not find almost €2bn was the culmination of more than a year in which the once lauded German "fintech" tried to repel allegations of fraud within its business. Pressure is building on German regulators that sought to protect Wirecard, including a two-month short-selling ban, instead of investigating the claims of whistleblowers.

Experts told the FT that Gerrnan regulators and politicians were distrustful of foreign speculators and wanted to nurture a rare tech success in a country better known for producing industrial goods.

Braun resigned the day after the missing money was revealed but not before broadcasting a video in which he said the company could have been the victim of a considerable fraud.