Schadenfreude more than sympathy is likely to greet the plight of short sellers caught on the wrong end of a bet about the direction of Volks­wagen’s share price. Their scramble to cover losses sent the European carmaker’s price so high that on Tuesday morning it was – briefly but still ridiculously – the largest company in the world by market capitalisation. Some hedge funds may fail because they have incurred such big losses, but not many people will be weeping at that. The real cause for concern is the opacity of the German stock market.

The immediate cause of the problem was Sunday’s revelation that Porsche, which has been engaged in a creeping takeover of VW for the past three years, controlled not just 35 per cent of the group as had been known, but 74.1 per cent, through an equity stake of 42.6 per cent and 31.5 per cent in cash-settled options, which it did not have to disclose. Taken with the 20.1 per cent owned by the state of Lower Saxony, that left a free float of just 5.8 per cent, barely above the 5 per cent required for the company to remain in Germany’s blue-chip Dax index.