Enlarge image
Former Wirecard manager Bellenhaus: key figure in the fraud process
Photo: Lukas Barth / dpa
According to the accused Oliver Bellenhaus, managers at Wirecard invented important balance sheets.
The books were always falsified to deceive the auditors, the key witness explained on Wednesday in the criminal proceedings before the Munich Regional Court.
This often happened in a hurry.
"The auditor needed something, and then the panic broke out," explained the former governor of Wirecard in Dubai.
"Then we tried to tinker something." The decisive question was: "Is the auditor happy?"
Shortly after Wirecard went bankrupt in the summer of 2020, Bellenhaus turned himself in to the Munich public prosecutor and gave extensive testimony there.
His lawyers have asked for a reduced sentence and his release from custody, which the court and prosecutors have so far refused.
Bellenhaus has been in custody for around two and a half years.
In addition to Bellenhaus, the former Wirecard boss Markus Braun and the former chief accountant Stephan von Erffa are accused.
The public prosecutor accuses them of accounting fraud, market manipulation, breach of trust and gang fraud.
Unlike Bellenhaus, the lawyers Brauns and Erffas have rejected the allegations.
In the judge's questioning of the key witness Bellenhaus, a lot revolved around the so-called third-party partners to whom Wirecard had allegedly outsourced a large part of the business in Asia.
According to the group, the business is said to have generated the entire group profit in recent years, but Bellenhaus reaffirmed on Wednesday that this third-party business did not exist.
"I say no in the clearest possible terms," said the key witness.
When he took over responsibility for this business in 2013, it was clear to him that »window dressing« was being practiced, i.e. figures were being embellished.
»But by 2016 it was absolutely clear that the business didn’t exist.«
"The millions went out there"
In his estimation, the invented third-party business had already started to be built up in 2010.
The alleged partners had "all had no license" and regulatory approval for payment processing.
How a payment processing business of 100 billion euros should have existed within five years is "illusory".
As early as 2013, Wirecard was no longer making enough money to cover the exploding costs.
"Millions went out, you couldn't count that quickly."
Bellenhaus said he was introduced to his job in Dubai by former Chief Financial Officer Burkhard Ley.
Against Ley is also determined, he rejects all allegations.
Bellenhaus described how he used Excel files to fake the wrong numbers.
He recreated such files again over Christmas.
However, the original files no longer existed, they were "lost" in the course of the proceedings.
The defense of ex-Wirecard boss Braun accuses Bellenhaus of having deliberately destroyed data.
When asked why the files were lost, Bellenhaus said: »The files were in the cloud.
If you stop paying for the cloud, the data goes under, that's the way it is."
Braun, who is also in custody, has not yet personally commented on the charges in the process.
It is not yet clear whether he will speak or remain silent on January 19, as planned by the court.
Braun's defense attorney Alfred Dierlamm had stated that the court must first decide on his request to suspend the process.
Dierlamm justified the application with an unmanageable flood of new case files.
The Dax group collapsed in June 2020 when it became known that 1.9 billion euros were missing from the cash register.
The Wirecard bankruptcy is one of the biggest financial scandals in post-war German history.
mic/mhs/Reuters