Nigel Hanson

Financial Times

Wirecard, the Munich-headquartered payments processor, had become a fintech giant and a German stock market darling over the latter part of the past decade. In 2020, following years of patient and courageous investigative research by the FT, its activities were exposed as fraudulent.

The FT’s work could not have happened without the “generally lovely and unflappable” in-house lawyer Nigel Hanson, who worked closely with investigations reporter Dan McCrum dealing not just with Wirecard’s fury but German banks and regulators’ baseless claims that the FT was in league with speculators. Hanson has been widely held as having been “instrumental” to the investigations team’s work, which included coping with electronic and physical surveillance and fending off London’s most aggressive litigators. Wirecard collapsed into insolvency and the newspaper was vindicated.

Hanson joined the FT in 2011 having been variously a criminal and media lawyer in private practice – as well as having a four-year spell as a news reporter and legal journalist under his belt.