The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

Financial scandal: Wirecard boss Markus Braun remains behind bars

2021-02-26T08:43:23.830Z


The judges took a month to examine their detention, but now they are following the prosecution's arguments: Ex-Wirecard boss Markus Braun remains in custody.


Icon: enlarge

Ex-Wirecard boss Braun: "Urgent suspicion"

Photo: Fabrizio Bench / REUTERS

After several weeks of examination, the Munich Higher Regional Court decided that the former Wirecard boss Markus Braun must remain in prison after seven months in custody.

Braun was arrested last year on June 22nd, but was released against conditions.

On July 22nd, the Munich public prosecutor had him arrested again because the statements of key witness Oliver B., from the point of view of the investigators, had expanded and corroborated the suspicion.

After six months of pre-trial detention, a court automatically checks whether the accused must be released or whether the public prosecutor's office can still assert compelling reasons for continued detention, for example because there is still an urgent suspicion and a risk of flight or blackout.

In addition to Braun, the former chief accountant of Wirecard, Stephan von E., and the key witness Oliver B, who had been decided on a few weeks ago, will remain behind bars.

The former CFO Burkhard Ley was released from prison a few months ago, subject to conditions.

More than 20 other managers are being investigated, but they are initially at large.

The former number two at Wirecard, the Austrian Jan Marsalek, is advertised worldwide for manhunt.

He fled after the fallen DAX group had to admit on June 18 that there were no receipts for 1.9 billion euros in trust accounts in Manila.

Contradictory statements

The Munich public prosecutor continues to accuse Braun of commercial gang fraud, he is also said to have presented false business figures, embezzled money and manipulated the markets.

The ex-boss rejects all these allegations.

The higher regional court now followed the arguments of the public prosecutor that there is still an urgent suspicion.

In addition, the judges apparently still see the risk of escape and blackout.

Since other suspected gang members like Marsalek are at large, collusion between the accused cannot be ruled out.

The investigators have not yet been able to clear up many facts, also because the crime scenes are often abroad and the public prosecutor's office depends on legal assistance from authorities in Singapore, the Philippines and elsewhere.

Braun had testified to the public prosecutor in the weeks before and after Christmas, but continued to portray himself as a victim of the fraud.

As head of the company, he must have been accused of not having seen the iceberg towards which the Wirecard ship was heading, he is said to have told investigators.

He was so fixated on the supposed enemies from the outside - critical media and hedge funds that bet on a price decline - that he overlooked the enemies in the company, was meant primarily Jan Marsalek.

He knew nothing of Marsalek's machinations.

Braun's argument: As the largest shareholder, he has absolutely no interest in plundering the company.

But apparently the public prosecutor's office does not accept everything from Braun.

Some of his statements don't seem to match reality.

The ex-boss also testified that he only briefly knew the key witness Oliver B. and only met him once.

In fact, emails and calendar entries available to SPIEGEL show that the two met around half a dozen times in 2014 and 2015, once apparently in autumn 2019.

There are contradicting statements between Braun and B. with a view to key issues of the financial scandal.

The question arises as to whether the missing 1.9 billion euros even existed or, if so, where did they seep away.

The prosecution assumes that this money was at least never in Filipino escrow accounts and also not in corresponding accounts in Singapore.

Marsalek had told the auditor EY and the special auditors from KPMG that the money had been transferred from a bank in Singapore to accounts of two Philippine banks at the end of 2019 by the former trustee Shanmugaratnam Rajaratnam - nickname "Shan" and managing director of Citadelle.

The new trustee is the Filipino lawyer Mark Tolentino.

An indictment brought by the Singaporean authorities against »Shan« shows, however, that most of the accounts he kept for Wirecard did not have any money or that these accounts did not even exist.

The former trustee is said to have admitted this by now.

Where are the 1.9 billion?

From the point of view of the public prosecutor, these findings apparently support the statements of Oliver B. The former Wirecard governor in Dubai had presented himself to the public prosecutor at the beginning of July, so far as the only one to admit his involvement in the fraud and severely incriminated Braun, Marsalek and other managers.

B. claims that the missing 1.9 billion did not exist, as did the businesses behind them.

Millions of records have been falsified to give a different impression.

It is about external partner companies that processed payments on behalf of Wirecard.

For these third party partners (TPAs), Wirecard took on the risk that payments would be canceled and thus lost sales, and left its own profit sharing from these transactions as security in the trust accounts.

Since 2017 at the latest, the complete profit reported by Wirecard should have come from these third-party partner transactions.

According to Oliver B., however, most of the merchants for whom Wirecards partners want to process payments do not exist.

Braun, on the other hand, is said to have claimed at the beginning of 2020, when the auditing company KPMG carried out a special investigation at Wirecard, that he knew the customers of Wirecard's third-party partners.

According to his account, Marsalek and some of his helpers embezzled the money earned there.

In procedural circles it is said that the public prosecutor's office is following different hypotheses until further notice.

The investigation is likely to drag on for many months.

Icon: The mirror

Source: spiegel

All business articles on 2021-02-26

You may like

News/Politics 2024-01-29T09:18:51.963Z

Trends 24h

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.