BaFin's role in this is indeed pretty astonishing:
"The German financial watchdog has filed a criminal complaint against two Financial Times journalists and several short sellers, accusing them of potential market manipulation over reports about suspected accounting irregularities at payments processor Wirecard."
Indeed, they failed big time. Apparently some BaFin employees were also trading the shares of Wirecard (and presumably other companies they were supposed to oversee).
There's a pretty good book on the whole sad story: Money Men: A Hot Startup, A Billion Dollar Fraud, A Fight for the Truth by the FT journalist that did most of the digging.
If journalists and short sellers hadn't kept pushing (against Wirecard, auditors, and BaFin), Wirecard might have survived a bit longer, managed to acquire Deutsche Bank, and then (with the merged balance sheet) gotten away with it. Mind boggling.
However, I must say, after reading that book and several articles about the whole thing, I am still not quite sure how they could keep up the fraud for so long, what exactly happened there, and who benefited.
(I suspect that crypto firms have taken over a lot of Wirecard's "business"...)
"The German financial watchdog has filed a criminal complaint against two Financial Times journalists and several short sellers, accusing them of potential market manipulation over reports about suspected accounting irregularities at payments processor Wirecard."
https://www.ft.com/content/8e1948be-6060-11e9-b285-3acd5d435...