The Wirecard trial begins

The Story

The trial of three Wirecard executives accused of stealing three billion euros from credit institutes and investors has started.

The star of the show is former Wirecard CEO Markus Braun. Locked up in a high-security prison in Bavaria since the summer of 2020, he is accused of being the leader of a gang that used the payment provider to steal vast sums of money.

Famously absent will be Braun’s second in command, Jan Marsalek, who fled the country in the weeks after the fraud was exposed. He is now believed to be living in Moscow…

Prosecutors are convinced that Braun and his executives created a scam on a global scale, in which they invented Asian customers for their payment system to make it look like they were processing hundreds of billions of euros in transactions. Wirecard then used these fake transactions - which made up three quarters of all their income - to lure in gullible investors who believed that they were buying their piece of a 21st century El Dorado.

The central w…