And then he sits there. Markus Braun, a little thinner than when I met and experienced him as Wirecard boss, but otherwise a lot is the same: thin glasses, thick wristwatch, navy blue turtleneck sweater. Instead of in his board office, he is now deep underground, in a bunker with a bomb-proof ceiling, where the first trial against the former Wirecard boss began on Thursday. Markus Braun denies everything the investigators accuse him of.
The bunker is located on the grounds of the Stadelheim correctional facility, some underground paths lead from the prison into the hall, 15-meter-high ceilings, dozens of people involved in the first rows: public prosecutors, judges, lay judges, the accused, various defense attorneys and so on. The number of people in this room alone makes it clear: a mammoth process is starting here. It’s about nothing less than the collapse of a Dax member, a 20 billion euro corporation that imploded overnight in 2020, about numbers that are simply not tangible for people, and events, politics and shook the economy. How could there not be a mammoth or a century before the word process?
But numbers and words aside. Let’s take a look at the man on whom all eyes were directed at the start of the trial, mine too, of course. To the man who was Wirecard: Markus Braun. The business informatics graduate was never a man of big expressions, his face rarely showed an emotion that could have been interpreted. Is he tense? Is he bored, happy, sad? Markus Braun has always been difficult to interpret – and even in the courtroom you can actually only tell that he is concentrated, that he is talking to his lawyer, making notes, that he – maybe that’s the best thing – is fully there.
But when there is so little to interpret, one question arises over the course of a day when the indictment is read out for five hours: What is going on in his head, so what is Markus Braun thinking about? The key witnesses, because of whose statements he is in custody? To the prosecutors bringing charges after charges? Of the last days of the corporation he was the head of? Or does he think about his place of birth for a moment, does Markus Braun think about Vienna?
After all, it is part of the truth about Germany’s most spectacular company bankruptcy in decades: Austrians (surprisingly or not) play the leading roles. Markus Braun’s last place of residence before being taken into custody was Kitzbühel. Jan Marsalek, the ex-CEO who went into hiding with presumably the best contacts in the secret service milieu and of course well connected in Austrian politics, was also born in Vienna and, how could it be otherwise, fled abroad via Austria. Probably to Moscow. Does he sometimes think of Vienna too?