Former Wirecard CEO Markus Braun led the Wirecard Group for almost two decades until it went bankrupt. He denies all allegations of fraud.
(Photo: Reuters)
Dusseldorf, Frankfurt Former Wirecard boss Markus Braun will have to answer in court in just a few weeks. The Munich I district court announced on Wednesday that the main hearing in the process of the multi-billion dollar fraud scandal at the former Dax group Wirecard will begin on December 8th.
The 4th major criminal chamber under the presiding judge Markus Födisch has initially scheduled 100 appointments until the end of 2023. The hearings are held in a boardroom on Stettnerstrasse in the Munich-Stadelheim prison. The process in the diesel scandal against former Audi boss Rupert Stadler has been going on there for a good two years.
Braun is at the center of the process of the biggest accounting scandal in the history of the Federal Republic. The Aschheim payment service provider Wirecard collapsed in the summer of 2020 after the once most valuable financial group in Germany had to admit that alleged trust assets in the billions did not exist.
Wirecard process: more than 700 volumes of investigators
The public prosecutor’s office in Munich I investigated for almost 20 months, then. The investigators conducted 450 interrogations and made 80 requests for legal assistance – including to Singapore, Belarus and the Philippines. They summarized their findings in more than 700 volumes. In March 2022, they finally filed a 474-page indictment against Braun and two other former Wirecard managers.
The former chief accountant and deputy chief financial officer of the group, Stephan von Erffa, and the former governor of Wirecard in Dubai, Oliver Bellenhaus, also have to take a seat with Braun in the dock.
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The public prosecutor accuses the trio of commercial gang fraud, the misappropriation of group assets, falsification of accounts and manipulation of the Wirecard share price. Managers have worked for years to make the company look more successful than it actually was, prosecutors said. For this they are said to have invented extremely profitable businesses, especially in Asia. Accordingly, the balance sheets for the years 2015 to 2018 are falsified.
The public prosecutor’s office bases its indictment on the testimony of Bellenhaus to a large extent. He is acting as a key witness in the upcoming trial.
On the other hand, von Erffa and Braun reject the allegations. Braun even sees himself as a victim of long-term fraud within the group and a gang that embezzled millions of dollars behind his back. Bellenhaus and Braun have both been in custody since July 2020 – Bellenhaus in Munich-Stadelheim, Braun in Augsburg-Gablingen.
It was only in September of this year that the Munich Regional Court allowed the indictment to remain unchanged after a six-month review. The pending proceedings are likely to be one of the largest commercial criminal proceedings in the history of the Federal Republic. The former Wirecard shareholders are also hoping that the process will clarify how the insolvency came about.
However, one of those who could contribute a lot to the enlightenment will not contribute anything. Because Jan Marsalek, one of the alleged masterminds behind the billion dollar fraud, will not sit in the dock. The former Asia board member Wirecards has been on the run since June 2020 and is wanted with an international arrest warrant. There was much to suggest that he was in Russia.
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