New owner for Wirecard’s India forex unit; more conflicts for Nilekani

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Editor's note: Singapore-based payments firm NIUM is buying Wirecard Forex India, or WFI, as it prepares to take a big bite out of India’s $83 billion remittance business.  A little over a year after Wirecard was ordered into insolvency proceedings by German regulators, its core assets and subsidiaries worldwide have been auctioned off. The latest subsidiary to be sold is WFI, formerly known as Star Global Currency Exchange Pvt. Ltd, a Reserve Bank of India authorized dealer in foreign currency exchanges. “Wirecard Forex was run as a standalone business, and it got stuck in the entire Wirecard issue. We saw the size of the opportunity this deal presents, and decided to invest since this is the best way to acquire a licence in India,” says Prajit Nanu, co-founder and CEO of NIUM. (Full disclosure: Nanu has invested in The Morning Context, in his personal capacity.) The Wirecard debacle is one of the biggest financial frauds committed in recent years. Through dubious transactions taking place all across the world over several years, senior executives at the payments giant managed to hide around €1.9 …