Prosecutors suspect Wirecard was looted before collapse; White House Seeks Crackdown on U.S.-Listed Chinese Firms; Henry Blodget Built a Financial Media Empire; Ben & Jerry's Radical Ice Cream Dreams; My engagement story

1) The story at German payments processor Wirecard (WDI.DE) keeps getting crazier...

Here's the latest news from the Financial Times, the lone media organization that did good work over the years to expose the fraud (which I warned my readers about many times, starting on March 20, 2019): Prosecutors suspect Wirecard was looted before collapse. Excerpt:

German prosecutors suspect Wirecard was looted before its spectacular collapse in June, with $1 billion funneled to opaque partner companies even as the payments group fought allegations of accounting fraud.

According to people familiar with the probe and a document seen by the Financial Times, the embezzlement is suspected to have taken the form of unsecured loans, which Wirecard claimed were for advance payments to merchants processing card transactions through its partners in Asia.

2) At least in the case of Wirecard, few Americans were burned, as the stock only traded in Europe.

Unfortunately, that's not the case for hundreds of fraudulent Chinese companies that have listed on U.S. exchanges – costing naïve investors here tens of billions of dollars – so it's good to see us finally cracking down. White House Seeks Crackdown on U.S.-Listed Chinese Firms. Excerpt:

Chinese companies with shares traded on U.S. stock exchanges would be forced to give up their listings unless they comply with U.S. audit requirements under a plan recommended Thursday by the Trump administration.

The proposal addresses a long-simmering dispute over U.S. regulators' inability to inspect the financial audits of Chinese companies that sell shares in U.S. markets. It follows bipartisan legislation that passed the Senate in May, which would give Chinese companies that don't comply three years to delist in the U.S. and find a new exchange.

Under the plan, Chinese firms that are already listed on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq Stock Market would have to comply by 2022 – or give up their listings on those exchanges.

To comply, Chinese auditors would have to share their work papers with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, a specialized audit regulator overseen by the U.S. government.

Chinese firms that aren't yet public – but which plan to do an initial public offering in the U.S. – would have to comply before they can go public on NYSE or Nasdaq, and wouldn't get until 2022 to follow the rules, according to senior Treasury Department and Securities and Exchange Commission officials.

Frankly, in light of the widespread fraud that's occurred over the years, I'd simply ban all Chinese companies from our exchanges. Why mess around with trying to separate the good apples from the many bad ones? It's like Russian athletes at the Olympics – the cheating is so systemic that you need a blanket ban, at least for a good while...

3) Speaking of bans, I enjoyed Michelle Celarier's profile of Henry Blodget in Institutional Investor. I'm happy for him – he's a good guy, was sure proven right on Amazon (AMZN), and Business Insider does excellent work. Henry Blodget Was Banned From the Financial Industry. So He Built a Financial Media Empire . Excerpt:

Now 13 years old, Business Insider – which, like Amazon, had a plethora of doubters along the way – was still in its relative infancy when Bezos came on board. But in 2015, the startup was sold to Axel Springer, one of Germany's biggest media companies, which was keen to build a digital media presence in the U.S.

With that backing, and Blodget at its helm, Business Insider has ramped up to be one of the most vibrant – and popular – media companies in the world: By December 2018, it had more than 98 million monthly unique visitors in the U.S., ranking second behind CNN in the Comscore general-news category, according to Business Insider. That year, Business Insider hit $100 million in annual revenues and turned a profit, Axel Springer reported...

Blodget wants to double Insider's staff, which currently includes 500 journalists, and have 1 million paid subscribers in five years. He also wants to reach 1 billion global readers a month, up significantly from an audience of about 275 million now. The current number, the company says, includes "half of all U.S. millennials on the internet." Yet he skillfully dodges a question about Insider's desires to overtake giants like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. "We don't want to replace anybody," Blodget says.

But make no mistake: His ambitions are absolutely vast, as others at Insider quickly admit...

These days, the original staff has matured, and Insider has hired experienced journalists and editors, all of which enables it to go deeper into subjects and transition from a site supported by advertising to one at least partially supported by paid subscriptions.

4) I also enjoyed this New York Times interview with Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the founders of Ben & Jerry's Homemade ice cream: Ben & Jerry's Radical Ice Cream Dreams. Excerpt:

Greenfield: Ben and I are sometimes asked, "Why has Ben & Jerry's been successful?" We usually say it's because of three things: really high quality ice cream, great ingredients, very unusual flavors – and also the activist social mission of the company.

Some other company could start making ice cream with big chunks the same way Ben & Jerry's does, but Ben & Jerry's having this activist, outspoken social mission – other companies can't copy that. It's not something you can just say. It has to be who the people are.

How close of a connection do you feel to Ben & Jerry's today?

Cohen: It's like the company is a child who has moved out of the house and is now on their own. You hope that your child will have the values that you tried to instill. I'm amazed to see that the values are there. The regret I have is that the overwhelming problem in the world is the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer entities, and having Ben & Jerry's owned by one of those is, to me, unfortunate.

When the company was sold, something I resisted, there were people trying to comfort me by saying, "Now Ben & Jerry's can influence Unilever." I thought that was a bunch of . But I think that it has had a positive influence on Unilever. I certainly wouldn't say Unilever is values-led, but it is starting to integrate more social benefits into how it does business. That's good...

Greenfield: Well, so, Ben & Jerry's has been part of Unilever for about 20 years. For the first number of years, I think Unilever did not appreciate the mission of Ben & Jerry's, and its energy went into integrating Ben & Jerry's into the Unilever system. During that time, the social mission of the company suffered. The company as a brand also suffered.

About ten years ago, Unilever named a new chief executive for Ben & Jerry's, Jostein Solheim, who told us that his assignment was to re-radicalize Ben & Jerry's. And during that time, Ben & Jerry's rediscovered its soul. Ben & Jerry's publicly supported Occupy Wall Street. Ben & Jerry's publicly supported Black Lives Matter before most other companies. Now within Unilever, there's an incredible amount of respect for what Ben & Jerry's has done. I mean, this last statement by Ben & Jerry's after the George Floyd killing: There wasn't any other business talking about dismantling white supremacy.

How skeptical, though, should we be of the intentions behind statements like that? So many socially progressive statements that companies are making these days obviously also double as marketing.

Cohen: The deal about Ben & Jerry's is that when your company is acting on its values and those values resonate with your consumers' values, it's an incredibly deep connection based on justice, fairness, equality – the stuff that we thought the country is supposed to be about when they taught us in elementary school...

Do you ever meet people who are surprised that Ben and Jerry are real guys? And that you're them? And that you're still alive?

Cohen: Maybe two years after we started, when the business was this little homemade ice cream parlor in an old gas station in Burlington, Jerry and I were hanging around outside the store, and a boy and his father were walking in. The little boy said, "Daddy, is there really a Ben and a Jerry?" And the father said, "Maybe many, many years ago." Greenfield: I've had people ask me, "Are you the original Jerry?" I say: "There used to be another Jerry. I got hired to be the next one." My wife gets a kick out of that.

After all this time in and around the ice cream business, what have you learned about what ice cream means to Americans?

Cohen: It's about happiness. Ice cream is present at most any celebration, birthday, wedding, bar mitzvah. And Americans stock ice cream in their freezers as a staple. That is very unusual compared with other countries. Around the world, a huge amount of ice cream is sold in single-unit servings.

5) I have a soft spot in my heart for Ben & Jerry's, as I used it to romance my now-wife 30 years ago. In our first year of dating, I used to regularly buy a pint of Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough or Chocolate Fudge Brownie, bring it over to her apartment, and we'd eat it together.

Then, when I proposed to her in December 1992 after two years of dating, we were staying in a cabin at a bed and breakfast in Connecticut. In advance, I asked the proprietor to empty out a container of Ben & Jerry's, fill it almost to the top with water, and put it in the freezer. When we arrived, I surreptitiously placed the ring on top of the ice.

A little while later, as we were sitting in the living room watching TV, I casually suggested that she check to see if there might be some Ben & Jerry's in the freezer.

She snorted her skepticism, but went to check – and squealed in delight when she saw it. But when she opened it, she said, "Oh no, there's no ice cream – it's just ice."

I was bugging out – where was the ring?! – but she just hadn't seen it because it had a white platinum band (and, of course, diamond) that blended in with the ice.

I said, "Are you sure?", she looked again, saw it, and started shaking. I got down on one knee... and the rest is history. Twenty-eight years and three wonderful daughters later, we're still going strong!

Here's a picture of us outside the cabin the next morning:

Best regards,

Whitney