In the Munich Wirecard trial, an absentee becomes the main character: Jan Marsalek, who has been in hiding for three years, made massive accusations against the prosecution’s key witness in a letter written by his lawyer to the Munich I Regional Court. This emerges from excerpts from the letter that the defense of former CEO Markus Braun presented in the courtroom on Wednesday.
Through his lawyer, Marsalek, who is suspected of being in Russia, accuses star witness Oliver Bellenhaus of having served the public prosecutor’s office as an “adaptable witness” so that he could later “retire to Dubai as a purified penitent with company funds in the millions that he had embezzled.” Attorney Nico Werning, one of Braun’s defense attorneys, read these quotes.
In the morning there had been a war of words in the bunker-like underground courtroom in Munich’s Stadelheim prison. “Do you want to hide the letter in the drawer?” Braun’s angry defense attorney Alfred Dierlamm asked in the direction of the judge’s bench.
As can be seen from the quotes read in the courtroom, Marsalek not only contradicts statements by the key witness, but also the insolvency administrator’s assessment that a large part of the Wirecard business was invented. That would bolster Braun’s defense. His lawyers requested that the full letter be read out during the main hearing. The chamber initially did not decide on the application, but ended the day of the trial.
A loss of more than three billion euros
According to the indictment, the CEO, who has been in custody since the summer of 2020, and his accomplices formed a criminal gang of fraudsters. They are said to have fooled banks and investors into believing that there was no business in order to keep their loss-making company afloat with the help of billions in loans.
The Munich public prosecutor estimates the damage to lenders at over three billion euros, which would be the largest fraud damage in Germany since 1945. The prosecution is largely based on the testimony of key witness Bellenhaus, formerly head of the Wirecard subsidiary in Dubai.
The process has been running since the beginning of December – the end is open
According to Braun and his defenders, the “crime picture” was completely different: According to this, the Wirecard deals were real, but mastermind Marsalek and his accomplices are said to have excluded the group and diverted around two billion euros to their own accounts. An equally clueless and innocent ex-CEO Braun would have been deceived himself and would have been neither a perpetrator nor an accomplice. Braun’s defense attorneys have repeatedly accused the key witness Bellenhaus of lying.
This argument contradicts not only the prosecution, but also the assessment of the insolvency administrator Michael Jaffé: In a recent status report, he had recently confirmed that he had found no trace of the missing billions. Should the court ultimately follow Dierlamm’s arguments, it would mean great damage to the reputation of both the Munich public prosecutor’s office and the insolvency administrator.
The process has been running since the beginning of December, Wednesday was the 53rd day of the process. So far, however, only witnesses have testified who are not counted by the investigators as part of the Wirecard gang and, in Dierlamm’s opinion, accordingly have no insider knowledge of the largest case of fraud in German post-war history.
Marsalek is said to have sealed off his business from the rest of the board, as the former product director Susanne Steidl explained as a witness. “I didn’t have any passwords,” said the 52-year-old manager. Like Braun and Marsalek, she also comes from Austria.
The key figure Marsalek
As Chief Sales Officer, Marsalek was responsible for business with so-called third-party companies. External payment service providers processed – real or invented – credit card payments on behalf of Wirecard, mainly in Asia. In the summer of 2020, the former Dax group collapsed because 1.9 billion euros of alleged revenue from this third-party business could not be found. Marsalek fled abroad and is believed to be in Russia, while Braun turned himself in to justice.
According to Steidl, Marsalek’s third-party business was also inaccessible to her as a member of the top management, the transactions were stored on external computer systems: “It wasn’t on the Wirecard servers,” she said. “I had no idea where that was.”
According to Steidl, he had no idea that the group was criminal: “In my opinion, Wirecard was successful.” However, she had doubts about both Braun and Marsalek: In the months before the collapse of the group, Steidl was of the opinion that both “had to go”, she confirmed a question from the judge.
Another of many Wirecard mysteries remained unsolved on Wednesday: what motive could have driven Marsalek to report to the court by letter from a lawyer.
