<
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/how-the-biggest-fraud-in-german-history-unravelled>
"Late in the spring of 2020, Jan Marsalek, an Austrian bank executive, was
suspended from his job. He was a widely admired figure in the European business
community—charismatic, trilingual, and well travelled. Even at his busiest, as
the chief operating officer of Wirecard, Germany’s fastest-growing
financial-technology company, he would assure subordinates who sought a minute
of his time that he had one, just for them. “For you, always,” he used to say.
But he would say that to almost everyone.
Marsalek’s identity was inextricable from that of the company, a global payment
processor that was headquartered outside Munich and had a banking license. He
had joined in 2000, on his twentieth birthday, when it was a startup. He had no
formal qualifications or work experience, but he showed an inexhaustible
devotion to Wirecard’s growth. The company eventually earned the confidence of
Germany’s political and financial élite, who considered it Europe’s answer to
PayPal. When Wirecard wanted to acquire a Chinese company, Chancellor Angela
Merkel personally took up the matter with President Xi Jinping.
Then, on June 18, 2020, Wirecard announced that nearly two billion euros was
missing from the company’s accounts. The sum amounted to all the profits that
Wirecard had ever reported as a public company. There were only two
possibilities: the money had been stolen, or it had never existed.
The Wirecard board placed Marsalek on temporary leave. The missing funds had
supposedly been parked in two banks in the Philippines, and Wirecard’s Asia
operations were under Marsalek’s purview. Before leaving the office that day,
he told people that he was going to Manila, to track down the money.
That night, Marsalek met a friend, Martin Weiss, for pizza in Munich. Until
recently, Weiss had served as the head of operations for Austria’s intelligence
agency; now he trafficked in information at the intersection of politics,
finance, and crime. Weiss called a far-right former Austrian parliamentarian
and asked him to arrange a private jet for Marsalek, leaving from a small
airfield near Vienna. The next day, another former Austrian intelligence
officer allegedly drove Marsalek some two hundred and fifty miles east.
Marsalek arrived at the Bad Vöslau airfield just before 8 P.M. He carried only
hand luggage, paid the pilots nearly eight thousand euros in cash, and declined
to take a receipt.
Philippine immigration records show that Jan Marsalek entered the country four
days later, on June 23rd. But, like almost everything about Wirecard, the
records had been faked. Although Austrians generally aren’t allowed dual
citizenship, Marsalek held at least eight passports, including diplomatic cover
from the tiny Caribbean nation of Grenada. His departure from Bad Vöslau is the
last instance in which he is known to have used his real name."
Via
The RISKS Digest Volume 33 Issue 64:
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/33/64#subj14
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
