In Autumn 2019, I got a call from a source.
He asks me, "Have you ever looked into Wirecard?"
"The payment processor? No."
"It's a very strange company."
"Companies are being set up."
"Money comes in, money goes out."
That is totally spooky.
He'd been called by foreign friends
who used to work in intelligence agencies,
and they warned him,
"Are you interested in Wirecard?"
"Keep your hands off it."
Mr. Braun, reports about your business
read like a financial thriller.
Bogus sales,
balance sheet manipulations, many allegations.
The former COO, Jan Marsalek, is on the run.
The biggest fraud scandal in German history.
There's an international manhunt for Jan Marsalek.
It's unbelievable how something like this can survive for so long.
It was clear to me this was going to be a huge story.
Scammers take advantage of people's desires.
In Germany, the desire was, "We want to be at the front of the pack."
Germany's industry is extremely successful
but very old, very traditional.
These famous German brands like Siemens, Daimler, BMW, Volkswagen,
these are all very old companies.
That's why German politicians
and German business people are often asked,
"Where are actually your new companies?"
We want a major, global, digital champion of our own
like in Silicon Valley.
The German Google, the German Facebook.
And Wirecard played on that desire beautifully.
Wirecard was like the German PayPal.
Wirecard the processor
for online trade, online shops.
They make sure when I buy something,
the money gets from my credit card to the online retailer.
There's a company founder dressed
in a black turtleneck with a neat turn of phrase…
…who presents himself as a visionary.
The "Steve Jobs of the Alps."
Wirecard is one of the fastest-growing
financial commerce platforms.
Wirecard jumped on the digital train in the '90s
that continues to pick up speed,
and now Wirecard has even overtaken Deutsche Bank
with their worth placed at over €20 billion.
A symbol for the new era of the finance sector.
This was a company on the rise.
It grew unlike any other company we'd seen in Germany.
And that rise, that immense growth, led many people to believe in it.
New, successful, global, profitable
and German politicians were proud to be able to say,
"Hey. We have a FinTech company!"
When the chancellor went to China,
she actually campaigned for Wirecard in 2019 with Xi Jinping.
Everyone in Germany believed in this company.
No one would have believed that this was the work of gangsters.
Outside of Europe, we see a growth of 25%
strongly driven by new regions, by developing regions of Asia.
My name is Tobias Bosler,
and I have been, for many years, a short seller.
Most people invest thinking a share price will rise.
A short seller differs from an investor by making money when a share price falls
and loses money when it increases.
I investigated Wirecard for two years.
I understood its business model perfectly.
It handled payments for online businesses in pornography and online gambling,
but it wasn't illegal.
What would you call them?
- Are you joking? -I'm not joking.
The poker market in the US was 50% of the global poker market.
But that all changed in 2006
when a new law in America made it illegal
to handle payments for US citizens playing poker.
So Wirecard lost a major source of income.
But, in spite of this law, the profits of Wirecard kept rising.
What company is able to do that?
This can't be right.
In Germany, short sellers have a bad reputation.
The perception is because they are betting on the share price dropping,
they are actively seeking to destroy companies.
Jobs are lost and that can't be good.
The Zatarra Report wasn't seen as credible.
The criticism was always, "What kind of report is this?"
"There isn't enough evidence to back up its claims."
"It's just mud-slinging
because German companies do not make mistakes."
It was seen very strongly as an attack on Germany itself, on German companies.
A few weeks after I opened the short position,
I got a call from the Wirecard lawyer.
He says, "You are short-selling Wirecard."
I thought, "How did you figure that out?"
He read me all the transactions.
Date, time, amount, rate.
He knew everything. Then he says, "We need to talk."
He arrived with two thugs.
They looked exactly as you imagine thugs to be.
Straightaway they pushed me
and punched the wall with full force.
I admit I was really scared.
What company sends a bunch of thugs to an investor's office?
After that, I stopped looking into Wirecard.
I let it be.
And no one else looked closely into Wirecard,
except Dan McCrum.
My dear shareholders…
Well, if I find a weak spot, but I'm…
It's not working. It's not cold enough.
Marsalek is a completely different type.
Extremely charming,
very approachable, a great communicator.
Everything Braun didn't have, Marsalek had,
which is why they were a great team.
I think that very few people knew who Jan Marsalek really was.
He is certainly at the center of this scandal.
He is the one who made sure that the turnover
was always the way his boss, Braun, wanted.
The German Stock Exchange is richer because of one company.
The payment-processing company, Wirecard, from Aschheim near Munich
has made the leap into the stock market premier league.
Wirecard's share price last year was €77.40.
Today it stands at €189.40.
Our figures tell a story of strong growth.
How our business is valued is a question for the investors.
Wirecard has shaken up the German stock exchange this week
and kicked the Commerzbank out of the elite DAX index.
A lot of investors believe in German values,
and now it has the DAX seal of approval.
So a lot of people thought a DAX company
would be tightly regulated by the German authorities.
Who wouldn't be thrilled to have money invested in Wirecard?
-What's with the glasses? - Best without glasses.
I only heard about the Financial Times' coverage secondhand.
NEW ATTACK ON WIRECARD
It was the typical bias.
They said, "It is a foreign conspiracy against a German company."
"A German company is the victim and must be protected."
Wirecard had hired a famous lawyer in Bavaria.
The lawyer said to the public prosecutor, Baumler-Hosl,
that Wirecard is under attack by short sellers
and its very existence is in jeopardy.
Hildegard Baumler-Hosl contacted the German financial regulator.
The regulator BaFin then said, "We need to protect Wirecard."
And banned short-selling of Wirecard shares.
And even filed criminal charges against Dan McCrum and Stefania Palma.
This financial thriller continues with the latest punch-up
between Wirecard and the Financial Times.
In February, there were new articles and allegations
and the share price fell again.
At the end of March, new accusations were published
and the share price collapsed once again.
A BILLIONAIRE ON THE DEFENSIVE
- Sound running. -Okay. Let's start.
How do you personally go about scandals, confusion, chaos?
Have you ever thought about resigning?
I've never thought about resignation.
Can you exclude the possibility of more dirty laundry airing
that will put the share price under pressure?
We firmly reject these serious allegations.
We think these allegations are mainly market speculations.
At the Frankfurt stock exchange,
Wirecard has announced its annual results, increasing its profits by 35%,
an increase of €350 million,
and says it will continue to grow this year.
Drink as much as you can take, here!
-Hey. I'm Nick Gold. - Hello, Nick. How are you?
What sort of size business were you thinking of doing?
At the moment, they are looking at investing €50 million.
Okay.
There was a short seller, Nick Gold,
who met with an investor who secretly recorded him.
This is as good as it gets in terms of--
-We know the article's coming. -Okay.
And I bet it's gonna be today.
We know now that this investor was actually a private detective
who was hired by someone associated with Wirecard.
I'm Jorg Schmitt from the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
I'm the chief editor of the investigations team.
I was at my desk when I suddenly got a call from an unknown number.
On the other end was a young woman.
She said, "Are you interested in Wirecard?"
"Do you know Prinzregentenstrasse 61?"
"It's the secret office of Jan Marsalek."
Even colleagues closest to Marsalek didn't know
that there was this second office in the Prinzregentenstrasse.
He would meet with a very illustrious circle of people,
do business, and host wild parties.
It's Marsalek's boy gang, I'd say.
We always find Martin W.,
who had been in the Austrian secret service.
El-Obeidi, a former Libyan intelligence officer.
Stani, a Russian who was supposedly in Munich visiting his sick mother,
but we think he was probably an FSB man, a Russian secret-service agent.
So suddenly we had three former intelligence agents
who were in and around the Prinzregentenstrasse.
And the thing is the Prinzregentenstrasse is not just anywhere in Munich.
It is directly opposite the Russian consulate.
There is obviously a secret-service connection.
That electrified me.
Why might Marsalek be so interesting to intelligence agencies?
Wirecard is a company
through which there are billions of transactions every year.
And these payments are gold mines for the secret services
because they show who could be compromised
because their creditcard information could show porn usage,
brothel visits, or whatever else.
To have a source like Marsalek
who is always on the move around the world,
that makes a lot of sense.
Vienna is sadly mostly an inviting terrain
for intelligence officers,
for dubious characters, spies, economic spies.
Border security in Libya was a topic that,
for a COO of a company like Wirecard, wasn't normal in the slightest.
As time went on, I asked myself, "What does he want in Libya?"
"And why does he seem to be getting support
from within the Austrian government
for a project that doesn't have humanitarian aims?"
If you ignore negative trends
or if you let immigration go unchecked,
things will go downhill very quickly.
It is logical that if Russia
wants to destabilize Europe,
they would try to create anxiety over supposed waves of refugees
to create a narrative that heats the debate again.
Marsalek has very good contacts in Russia.
That's why it's plausible that Jan Marsalek could have been trying
to set something up for the Russians.
It's criminal to wiretap journalists.
It's criminal to hack their email accounts.
The worst part was that this intimidation was quite successful.
The Financial Times had launched an internal inquiry into Dan McCrum,
and Wirecard made the most of this time,
and its market price kept rising.
They even got the German Chancellor to promote the company in China.
All this happened in those months when the Financial Times
didn't write anything critical of Wirecard.
Dr. Markus Braun, you've decided
to carry out an external audit
due to the allegations that the FT have made.
The question is, "Why only now?"
Well, we reacted very quickly.
The newspaper article was published only over a week ago.
At first, Braun didn't want this inquiry.
We reject these allegations 100%.
People at Wirecard must have known that this is going to be troublesome.
When will the auditors present their report?
I don't want to jump the gun, but we think within a few months.
We believe we will have results very quickly.
My name is Joachim Giehl.
I am Markus Braun's neighbor.
I always had the impression
that this man is under a massive amount of pressure.
He greeted nobody as his neighbor.
He always just got in his car.
No hello, no nothing.
There was one day, around 8:30 p.m.,
I parked my car in the garage.
It was dark, and I saw Markus Braun at the entrance to our building.
I saw him in the lamplight, and he looked extremely tense.
He was surrounded by some men whom I didn't recognize.
They seemed out of place.
They didn't look like businesspeople.
They looked like people who work as security, bodyguards,
a group of thugs…
…or people like that.
They didn't look like they were there to protect him.
Rather, I thought they were there…
…to do a job.
It was called "Project Panther,"
a plan for a hostile takeover.
A large consulting company put a document together
which showed how it could make sense
to merge an old bank with a new tech company.
The "Wirebank," or whatever it would have been called.
The idea was
if you merged these two companies,
with the Deutsche Bank balance being so much bigger than Wirecard's,
that then maybe the fraud at Wirecard would somehow get swept under the rug.
Auditors can no longer locate €1.9 billion
that are said to be in escrow accounts in Asia.
The two banks in the Philippines
where the €1.9 billion was supposed to be
said today that they had no business relations
with the payments processor.
The documents were faked.
The share price plunged by 70%.
Ladies and gentlemen,
on behalf of the management board of Wirecard,
I would like to give the following explanation.
The press conference that night was like The Muppet Show.
Braun reads from the teleprompter.
The death sentence has already been handed out,
and he's still making it seem as if he's going to announce
an amazing quarterly report next month.
Right now, it cannot be ruled out that Wirecard
has become the damaged party
in a fraud case of considerable proportions.
Where is the COO of the insolvent payment processor,
Wirecard, the Austrian, Jan Marsalek?
An agent always has an escape route.
We knew that Marsalek was in the office until that Friday afternoon.
He supposedly said
he had to go to the Philippines to clear the whole thing up.
He went for dinner with Martin W. that evening.
Martin W., who he knew from the Prinzregentenstrasse
and who used to be in the Austrian secret service
together with an Austrian, right-wing politician
booked Marsalek a flight.
Marsalek paid close to €8,000 in cash…
and then his trail disappeared.
He didn't go to the Philippines.
It doesn't make sense.
He couldn't have entered the country because of quarantine regulations.
There are databases where you can check flight data.
Since 2015, he flew at least 60 times to Russia.
And there was one flight
from a small airport near Vienna to Minsk.
It's not far from Moscow.
The border to Russia is not controlled, and that's where the trail is lost.
After that, it's just rumors.
We don't know for certain if Marsalek
was actually a secret-service informant or not.
Jan Marsalek was very well-connected
in the secret service parallel world,
and that's why I think he won't be that easy to find.
We know that he's online occasionally
via an old Telegram account.
I can check again.
He's been online every few months.
The last time was on May 27, 2021.
The German parliament has started
a political inquiry into Wirecard,
one of the biggest scandals of the German republic.
A financial disaster for those who invested their money in Wirecard.
It was the first DAX-listed company to go bust.
I think that Wirecard's inner circle
who knew what was really going on was very small.
Certainly Marsalek.
The fascinating question is, "What did Braun know about all this?"
He wasn't emotional. He was very tense.
And then he gave a short opening statement.
"All I can say… is we were all deceived."
"I'm a victim."
And then his lawyer said he won't answer any further questions.
He really sat there for three hours and didn't answer.
I think so far, we only know the tip of the iceberg.
Unless Jan Marsalek turns up somewhere and breaks his silence,
only then will we get the full story.