Se Munich public prosecutors have been investigating the Wirecard AG accounting scandal for a year and a half. On December 10, 2021, the law enforcement agency filed a first indictment against a close confidante of the Wirecard board member who went into hiding, Jan Marsalek. A spokeswoman for the Munich I public prosecutor’s office said on Thursday that in December an accused was charged with 26 cases of particularly serious fraud, money laundering and violation of accounting obligations. The prosecutors did not give a name, according to information from the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” it is the entrepreneur Aleksandar V.
Together with another accused, V. and Marsalek are said to have extracted assets from the Wirecard group “by 2019 at the latest” and “systematically concealed” their origins using an installed money laundering system and then returned them to the economic cycle. The third perpetrator is said to be Rami El Obeidi, former head of the Libyan secret service. The public prosecutor’s office specifies the amount of misappropriated funds at more than 22 million euros.
Marsalek’s business partner
According to the prosecutors, V.’s task was to receive the funds from the then Dax group via a specially founded company – IMS Capital Partners GmbH, which V. founded with Marsalek in the summer of 2016 . The purpose of the holding company was to invest in German start-ups.
However, according to the indictment, the Wirecard funds are supposed to have passed through IMS Capital and returned to V. as managing director as investment income. He then passed them on to his accomplices. But also in this agreement V. is said to have sought his own advantage. He is said to have diverted at least 8 million euros for private purposes in order to buy a property in Munich and to finance his own family offices in Switzerland.
Read F+ now for free for 30 days and get access to all articles on FAZ.NET.
READ F+ NOW
A commercial criminal chamber at the Munich District Court I now has to decide on the admission of the first indictment in the Wirecard environment. If convicted, V. could face several years in prison. The Munich resident is no stranger to online retailing: he founded his first company in 2002, and later developed an e-commerce strategy for the TUI Group and made a career for himself. In interrogations with Wirecard employees, his name was mentioned repeatedly in connection with consultancy contracts. V. is said to have received high fees, according to FAZ information also for the meanwhile insolvent delivery service Getnow and Goomo Holding. Wirecard held an indirect interest in the latter company from India.
Contradictory statements
The then Dax group admitted on June 18, 2020 that 1.9 billion euros in trust assets in Manila could not be proven. Wirecard had to file for bankruptcy a week later. The question of how much money was actually in the escrow accounts is very important for the investigation. The Wirecard board member at the time, headed by Chairman Markus Braun, always stated that the so-called Third Party Acquiring (TPA), i.e. the third-party business, accounted for more than a quarter of the total assets of the payment service provider. At the end of last year, however, the insolvency administrator Michael Jaffé expressed considerable doubts about this representation. After looking at the account statements of the trust banks in Singapore, he was convinced that the TPA business did not exist, at least not in the amount stated. The billions in assets reported by Wirecard were “simply invented,” said Jaffé.
Marsalek has been on the run since the billion-dollar bankruptcy and is suspected of being in Russia, Braun is in custody in the Augsburg correctional facility and has been waiting in vain for his release after several detention checks. The 53-year-old former Wirecard boss claims that the TPA business really existed, but that the proceeds from it were stolen by a criminal gang. An indictment against Braun is expected in the first quarter of this year.
.