It was the biggest deal Wirecard has ever completed. In 2015, the then German model company bought the Indian payment processor Hermes for 315 million euros. The board celebrated a successful coup. In 2020 Wirecard collapsed. Today, the insolvency administrator describes the Hermes Group as not for sale.
Our Handelsblatt investigative team has now found the reason for this. Six weeks before Wirecard took over the Hermes Group for 315 million euros, it was bought by a fund that had just been set up: for 35 million euros. The price difference of 280 million euros was long considered the biggest secret in the Wirecard scandal.
Our reporters have aired it. According to their research, Jan Marsalek and his close friend Henry O’Sullivan were behind the mysterious fund, registered on the African island state of Mauritius. Our editors analyzed hotel receipts and other documents, internal emails and private chats from Marsalek and O’Sullivan.
Their conclusion: Marsalek and O’Sullivan were already talking about the Hermes deal before the obscure fund was even founded in Mauritius. And then they chatted about what they could do with the many Wirecard millions.
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Today you can follow the money trail in the Handelsblatt Podcast Crime. Secret meetings in the Indian metropolis of Chennai, miraculous price increases within a few weeks, lavish celebrations in a night bar in Singapore. You experience a board member who doesn’t want to know anything, auditors who warn but nobody listens to. And you experience Rahul Sharma, the phantom.