In the Munich Wirecard trial, the court refused to stop the proceedings for the biggest German accounting scandal since 1945. The fourth criminal chamber of the Munich I district court rejected the suspension applications that both the defense lawyers for the ex-CEO Markus Braun and the lawyers for the former Wirecard chief accountant had made.
The judges do not see any serious violations of the rule of law, as chairman Markus Födisch explained on the tenth day of the trial. An “effective defense” is not affected.
The defense attorneys accuse the Munich public prosecutor’s office of having subsequently overwhelmed the defense with tens of thousands of pages of files and documents and, on the other hand, of having withheld essential documents from the lawyers. Braun’s defense attorney Alfred Dierlamm had stated that due process under the rule of law was not possible under these circumstances.
Braun, the former chief accountant and former Wirecard managing director in Dubai, are accused of commercial gang fraud. According to the indictment, they are said to have falsified the payment service provider’s balance sheets since 2015 and damaged lending banks by 3.1 billion euros.