The small airfield near Bad Vöslau is a place you really don’t come across by accident. Half an hour outside of Vienna, in the industrial area. Between fields on which apparently particularly noise-resistant rabbits hop around. Perhaps his greatest moment was several decades ago, as a gray memorial stone near the entrance reminds us: On April 11, 1955, then Federal Chancellor Julius Raab flew from Bad Vöslau to Moscow to negotiate Austria’s neutrality after the Second World War.
It was probably the discreet location of the airfield and not the history of the place, which is why another man flew east from there in June 2020: Jan Marsalek, Wiener, former board member of the financial service provider Wirecard. Shortly after the company collapsed, he fled Munich via Bad Vöslau and out of the European Union. He landed in Minsk and is now assumed to be in Moscow of all places – although he was probably more concerned with personal freedom and not that of his home country.
There are current indications that the ex-Wirecard boss is in Moscow
Today, the ex-manager is still one of the most wanted suspected white-collar criminals in the world. But he left his mark. There are several current indications that Marsalek could still be living in the Russian capital, and maybe not so badly: in an expensive residential area, as a guest in posh restaurants. That’s what the latest episode of the SZ podcast “Wirecard: 1.9 billion lies” is about. And the fact that the evidence for this usually comes from sources in which both information and disinformation are part of the business.
Looking back on Marsalek’s escape in 2020, something else becomes very clear: how close some Austrians were and still are to Russia in politics and business. In Vienna, Marsalek was able to make contacts for years that later helped him escape. Specifically: to Russian intelligence services. This is how the Wirecard investigative committee of the German Bundestag sees it. In the context of the Austrian-Russian Friendship Society (ORFG).
In the club itself, nobody wants to know anything about it. It’s about the friendship between the two cultures. Members would support this idea and would not receive anything in return, says the current Secretary General Markus Stender of the SZ in the podcast. But of course there are already contacts: cultural, political, economic. But where you then move on, everyone does it themselves.
A very Austrian point of view, committed to neutrality. Appropriately, the ORFG also says that the association is definitely not a network for secret services. If a member belonged to Russia’s domestic intelligence service, the FSB, you probably wouldn’t even know it. “And if it’s a prominent member of the FSB, and we know that, we don’t have a problem with that either. But of course we pay a little attention.”