While Marsalek initially argued against the step, he later supported the review, Braun said. But then in February 2020 he surprised him by telling him out of the blue that a few months earlier he’d changed the banks that held an escrow account for Wirecard, moving the money from Singapore to two banks in the Philippines, Braun told the court.
“I asked him whether he had lost his mind,” Braun said. But he told him that “this way we would lower the risk the funds could be frozen.”
Marsalek joined Wirecard in 2000 as an IT project manager and quickly built a reputation for programming, gaining the attention of Braun, a fellow native of Vienna. After Braun rose to the top job, Marsalek was tasked with keeping Wirecard’s global business humming — and expanding.
While Germany has had its share of accounting scandals and high-profile corporate collapses, few compare with Wirecard because the failure marked the first time that a company listed on Germany’s benchmark DAX index went bust.
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Wirecard was long seen as Germany’s ticket to the world of digital payment systems as the world shopped, played and communicated online. When it all turned out to be built on sand, politicians and regulators faced tough questions how a sophisticated economy like Germany could have been so easily tricked, and why nobody followed up on early warnings.
Marsalek escaped from Austria to Belarus on a private aircraft in 2020, according to an Austrian warrant. Various news media reports have put him everywhere from Russia to a secret hideaway in Turkey to a tropical island.
Bloomberg
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