Last year, German foreign intelligence rejected a proposal to meet with former Wirecard CEO Jan Marsalek in Moscow, fearing that the invitation to talk to the fugitive was a trap set by Russia’s FSB spy agency, sources told the Financial Times.
German criminal prosecutors have accused Marsalek, a former deputy commander of Wirecard, of being a key culprit in the 3.2 billion-euro fraud that shocked the country’s political and financial establishment.
Long hailed as one of Germany’s few technology success stories, the digital payments company collapsed in June 2020, shortly after revealing that half of its revenue and 1.9 billion euros in corporate money did not exist.
Marsalek’s meeting with the German spy agency BND was proposed in March 2021 by a businessman, according to people familiar with the matter. But the idea was rejected by senior BND officials in Berlin, who believed the businessman could be an informal FSB agent.
Marsalek, who was a close confidant of Marcus Brown, the chief executive and responsible for fraudulent operations, fled shortly before the Munich prosecutor’s office issued an arrest warrant in June 2020. Austrian police found that in June 2020, Marsalek boarded a private plane at a small airport south of Vienna and flew to the Belarusian capital, Minsk, where he lost track of the Austrian citizen.
Brown, who was detained at the Augsburg police station, was charged last month with fraud, breach of trust, account manipulation and market manipulation.
German prosecutors and the BND are now certain that Marsalek, now 42, has fled to Moscow, according to people familiar with their thinking.
Marsalek was a person of interest to three Western intelligence agencies that checked his connections with individuals or networks linked to Russia’s military intelligence directorate, the GRU, the FT revealed in 2020.
German criminal prosecutors, who put him on Interpol’s most wanted list, filed a request to extradite Marsalek to Russian law enforcement in 2020. They replied that they had no address for Marsalek and no trace of his entry into the country.
In March 2021, during a German parliamentary inquiry into the scandal, Russia’s foreign ministry tweeted that it was “puzzled by Wirecard’s chief operating officer Jan Marsalek’s allegations of close ties with Russia’s security services” and called on Berlin to stop politicize this issue. “
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At about the same time, however, a BND representative at the German embassy in Moscow was approached by a businessman who offered to meet with Marsalek, according to people familiar with the matter. Although the businessman did not have an official role in the Russian secret service, the German BND sees him as an informal collaborator of the FSB, informed people said.
Fearing that Russia’s intelligence service might try to set a trap to embarrass German intelligence, the meeting was dropped by BND top officials in Berlin, according to one man, adding that Angela Merkel’s office had since been closed. informed of the matter. The information was not passed on to the Munich Criminal Prosecutor’s Office, he added.
“You have to keep in mind that this is the same secret service that poisoned you [Alexei] Bulk, “another BND decision-maker told the FT.
This week, after the German daily Bild Zeitung reported on a proposal to meet with Marsalek in Moscow, Munich prosecutors met with BND officials in Berlin and were briefed on the matter.
The Bild report states that the German government knew Marsalek’s exact location in Moscow. BND chief Bruno Cal was vague when asked by MPs about Marsalek’s whereabouts during the parliamentary inquiry into Wirecard.
However, a person familiar with the matter denied this detail in the Bild report, adding that BND has only a “guess” about Marsalek’s exact address.
“The new revelations raise some serious questions if the parliamentary inquiry committee was led along the garden path [by the BND]”Said Jens Zimmermann, a Social Democrat MP and former member of the committee of inquiry.
BND, the Munich prosecutor’s office and Marsalek’s lawyer declined to comment.
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