BERLIN, Oct. 16 (Xinhua) -- Wirecard "categorically rejects the Financial Times' allegations of impropriety", the German financial service provider announced on Wednesday.
The British newspaper had published internal documents of Wirecard on Tuesday that would prove that the German service provider "fraudulently" inflated sales and profits at Wirecard businesses in Dubai and Ireland.
The article by FT would be a "compilation of a number of false and misleading allegations" which the newspaper had "raised before in a series of defamatory articles, and which were already fully refuted before", according to Wirecard.
FT reported that half of Wirecard's worldwide profits had been generated by a partner company from Dubai called Al Alam in 2016 and saw "strong indications" that much of the payment processing at Al Alam "could not have taken place".
After contacting 34 important clients of Al Alam, the FT reported that 15 "had never heard of Al Alam" while several other clients would not have answered inquiries by FT or could not be traced at all, the newspaper noted.
According to Wirecard, the 34 company names mentioned by FT would "refer to labels of customer clusters created for reporting and reconciliation purposes, each containing hundreds of individual genuine merchants." The conclusions drawn by FT would therefore be "not correct", Wirecard added.
In addition, Wirecard announced that the company's auditor Ernst & Young (EY) would have confirmed that "they have complied and will comply with all statutory and professional audit standards" although the FT report suggested that Wirecard could have "potentially" misled its long-time auditor EY.
Following the publication of the FT article on Tuesday, shares of Wirecard listed in Germany's benchmark stock index DAX plummeted by up to 23 percent and only recovered partially throughout trading on Wednesday.
