Words: Tom Ward
The story of Jan Marsalek, alleged fraudster and Russian spy, currently wanted by Interpol and on the run since June 2020, has recently taken a turn with police in Marsalek’s former home of Munich investigating an €80,000 payment to the landlord of Marsalek’s fiancée.
Originating in Dubai, the cash was reportedly sent with the reference “für Jan” (“on behalf of Jan”) and represents 12 months’ payment on the rental. It may provide a rare clue for investigators hunting the former Wirecard COO.
Accused of “fraud in the billions” by Munich prosecutors, the 41 year-old Marsalek has remained under the radar for 18 months now and, if reports are to be believed, has led a colourful and deceitful life including links with Russian Intelligence and to chemical weapons sales. In short, when it comes to Jan Marsalek’s escapades, you simply couldn’t make it up.
Born in 1980 in Vienna, Marsalek is thought to have founded his first e-commerce venture at the age of 19. However, it was his involvement with Wirecard – the now insolvent German payment processing firm – that would make Marsalek’s name infamous. After joining the company in 2000 due to his knowledge of WAP systems, Marsalek worked his way up through the company, becoming COO in 2010 and earning a place on the company’s board.
From there, things went downhill.
Reportedly, suspicions were raised about Wirecard’s practices back in 2008 when the head of a German shareholder association pointed out Wirecard’s balance sheet irregularities. As a result, two people were prosecuted due to insufficient disclosure of holding Wirecard’s stock. However, the Financial Times remained interested in Wirecard’s activities and launched its own report in 2015.
In 2019 the Financial Times released a series of reports consisting of whistleblower statements and internal documents obtained from Wirecard that revealed €1.9 billion was missing from the company.
According to the FT report, the findings of an internal 2018 investigation by Wirecard Singapore was covered up, despite Edo Kurniawan, head of accounting for Wirecard’s Asian-Pacific operations, being accused of artificially inflating profit. Reportedly, in one instance, €37m was moved between Wirecard subsidiaries and external businesses – a practice known as “round-tripping.” A February 2019 raid by Singaporean authorities followed, but serious action was taken against Wirecard at this time.
But Wirecard could not weather the storm forever, and filed for insolvency in June 2020. Its CEO Markus Braun resigned the same month and was arrested shortly thereafter in relation to the missing €1.9 billion. Once valued at €24bn, the crash of Wirecard is one of Europe’s largest accounting scandals of all time.
In the wake of the Wirecard fallout, questions were of course raised regarding possibly regulatory failure on the pat of Germany’s financial watchdog, the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin). Allegations of possible malpractice were also made against Wirecard’s auditor Ernst & Young. According to a special audit by KPMG, Ernst & Young failed to verify the existence of cash reserves appearing on supposedly fraudulent bank statements.
Yet the most interesting aspect of the story remains the fate of Wirecard’s board members. Christopher Bauer, the company’s former Asia manager who was under investigation by the National Bureau of Investigation, died in of natural causes in Manila, this July. While his death may have been convenient for his former colleagues, conspiracy theorists can stand down: “His death certificate does not indicate any external cause as to the manner of death,” Philippines Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra said.
With his colleagues dead or arrested, Marsalek’s whereabouts are the main focus of law enforcement efforts regarding the case. Marsalek disappeared just before being suspended from his job in June 2020. It was later revealed he had fled to Belarus on a private yet supposedly facilitated by an Austrian intelligence official, working for Austria’s spy agency whom Marsalek was close to. The officer was subsequently arrested in January 2021.
Interestingly, Marsalek may have links to Russian Intelligence, with reports from Bellingcat, Der Spiegel, and The Insider indicating he had fled to Minsk. In 2020 the German newspaper Handelsblatt reported that Marsalek was a guest of the GRU (The Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation) in a mansion near Moscow.
According to Russia’s own media, Marsalek may well have been a long-term GRU asset recruited in the 1990s. Whatever his status, since August 2020 Marsalek has been the subject of an Interpol Red Notice, which request law enforcement agencies worldwide to locate and arrest him with a view to extradition.
The plot may go deeper than suspected. On November 4th Brigadier Gustav Gustenau, a senior Austrian defence official in the directorate for security policy within the ministry, was removed from office and transferred to a new role over links to Marsalek.
Senior ministry and political sources told the Financial Times that the reason for his removal was concerns over his connections with Marsalek and Russia, claims Gustenau denies. However, the FT claims to have viewed document s that prove Gustenau directed government funding to projects Marsalek was involved in. Gustenau commented that, according to the FT, “no money had ever been disbursed from the ministry of defence to projects run by the fugitive.”
Who, exactly Marsalek really is may never be known. And the deeper you dig, the weirder it gets.
According to further FT reporting, Marsalek held a meeting in 2018 with a view to recruiting 15,000 Libyan militiamen – just one peek into Marsalek’s strange and worrying extracurricular activities during his time at Wirecard.
“The 40-year-old Austrian has led multiple lives, with complicated and overlapping commercial and political interests,” wrote Sam Jones, Paul Murphy and Helen Warrell in July 2020. “Sometimes those interests cleaved to Wirecard’s aggressive expansion plans in frontier markets. Sometimes they coincided with Mr Marsalek’s own sprawling and unusual range of personal investments. And sometimes they seemed to fit neatly with the work of Russia’s intelligence agencies.”
Jones, Murphy and Warrell outline conversations with “half a dozen individuals who worked directly with Mr Marsalek on projects in [Libya], and gained access to documents and emails concerning his affairs far outside the scope of his job at the helm of a major German multinational.”
“In general, Marsalek is a very strange character: he has an extreme affinity for security and is very mysterious,” one anonymous source told the FT. “I could never tell whether it was real or staged.”
Marsalek also reportedly boasted of visiting the ruins of Palmyra, in Syria, with the Russian military shortly after the site had been retaken from Isis. Reportedly it had been “a fantastic experience.
Meanwhile, Austrian media reported that Marsalek had come into possession of classified government documents pertaining to the nerve agent novichok. These documents were touted by Marsalek in London. The documents were believed to have been copies made by Johannes Peterlik, a former top civil servant at the Austrian ministry of foreign affairs.
As the depth of Marsalek’s shady dealings biomes clearer, helping to steal €1.9 billion may be the least of Interpol’s concerns. The recent bank transfer may be a careless clue, or it may be the actions of a man confident that he safely beyond the reaches of European law.
Read next: King’s ransoms: An incomplete history of royal money scandals
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