It was ready in mid-December, the first indictment in the Wirecard case. Quiet, quiet and without public fuss. It’s about millions allegedly stolen from Wirecard, money laundering, fraud. But what the public prosecutor’s office in Munich I has put together does not initially concern ex-board member Markus Braun or his casual colleague Jan Marsalek. The accused is the former Marsalek friend and business partner named V., an entrepreneur from Munich who, together with Marsalek, ran the investment company IMS Capital in Munich’s Prinzregentenstrasse – that obscure place that housed Marsalek’s secret second office and where the secret service agent entered and exited several countries went. The proceedings lead deep into the entanglements of Marsalek and his partners, who accuse and fight each other after the demise of Wirecard.
The public prosecutor’s office in Munich I accuses V. of willful money laundering, particularly serious fraud and a breach of accounting obligations. A spokeswoman confirmed this on Wednesday at the request of the SZ. V. had agreed “in 2019 at the latest” together with Marsalek and a Libyan business partner, a former head of the secret service, to embezzle more than 22 million from the Wirecard group and to establish the incriminated origin of the assets from the Wirecard group using an installed Systematically disguise money laundering system “. V.’s defense attorney did not want to comment on the allegations and merely stated that he would investigate the charges dated December 10th.
According to the investigators, it was V.’s job to use IMS Capital to transfer misappropriated Wirecard assets “through investments in German start-up companies into the legal economic cycle”. Accordingly, the whole thing would have been a structure with which Marsalek would have stolen money from Wirecard in order to make a return on his own account as a start-up investor – what is commonly referred to as money laundering. V., who officially acted as managing director of IMS, would have been Marsalek’s most important assistant in this system. It remains to be seen whether V. was not one of the many whom the fleeting Wirecard executive board led by the nose.
The court will soon have to clarify who has actually been fooling whom. The public prosecutor believes that V. did not invest the misappropriated assets from the Wirecard Group as agreed, but used part of them – around eight million euros – for private purposes. Among other things, he is said to have bought and built a house in Munich with the money and installed his own holding company in Switzerland. The fact that these deals with Marsalek had apparently been discussed in well-documented chat messages did not convince the public prosecutor of Vs innocence.
Where all the money came from was not questioned
Should the indictment be admitted to the Munich Regional Court, it will ultimately depend on how deeply V. was really involved in the affair and how much he knew. IMS Capital’s sponsors were officially two companies based in Istanbul, controlled by Marsalek’s Libyan business partner. A third Turkish company, also controlled by the former head of the Libyan secret service, billed consulting services and the acquisition of customer data from Wirecard in the years in question. The invoice amounts and the sum invested later at IMS are similar. However, it is apparently not certain whether it is the same money. The investigators believe, however, that money was withdrawn from Wirecard in this way.
Markus Braun, ex-board member of Wirecard.
(Photo: Filip Singer / Getty Images)
Shortly after his escape, Marsalek and his partner V. apparently broke up quickly. This is shown by chats between the two of them after Marsalek went into hiding in June 2020. The ex-Wirecard board member, who is presumably in Moscow today, and V. had set up with IMS Capital in the prestigious Villa Alfons at Prinzregentenstrasse 61, a house with history and an annual rent of 680,000 euros. The idea was to discover promising start-ups and provide them with capital. One of the holdings was the Getnow food delivery service. It was a kind of part-time job as a start-up investor, in which Marsalek invested a lot of time before the Wirecard fraud discovered.
Where did all the money come from that were used to finance the renovation, rent, parties and investments in young companies? That was not questioned, it was said in the summer of 2020 in the context of the now insolvent IMS Capital. Marsalek always had a lot of money and he had contacts around the globe.
In a possibly imminent procedure, one could find out more about how Marsalek acted in the background and how he secretly conjured up funds that allegedly came from the Wirecard group – and why he appeared as a cocky investor with Protz-Villa at the same time. So far, however, only V. has been accused. The alleged Libyan accomplice is brought as a witness – and Marsalek is, to this day, not available for the German judiciary.