Cheating started long before 2015

Cheating started long before 2015

Cheating started long before 2015

Oliver Bellenhaus

According to the indictment, former Wirecard manager Bellenhaus, former CEO Braun and other defendants have been falsifying Wirecard balance sheets since 2015 and crippling lending banks by €3.1 billion.

(Photo: dpa)

According to the key witness, the suspected fraud of billions of dollars in the Wirecard group would have started many years before 2015. According to manager Oliver Bellenhaus, who worked in Dubai until the collapse of Wirecard in 2020, the so-called business of third-party partners (TPA) with payment service providers in the Middle East and Southeast Asia was largely invented from the beginning.

“The data were never authentic,” Bellenhaus said on Wednesday before the Munich Regional Court. “There is no indication that Wirecard would have been profitable without the TPA business prior to 2015.”

The indictment only dates back to 2015 because history has barred. Wirecard allegedly reserved fictitious funds of almost two billion euros through TPA partners, which were allegedly stored in trust accounts in Southeast Asia.

Bellenhaus accused former CEO Markus Braun of “gang leadership”. The main decisions were taken by Braun and Jan Marsalek, who has been in hiding since the summer of 2020. As evidence, Bellenhaus referred to chat logs, according to which Braun would have given him instructions.

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Bellenhaus also made serious allegations against the third defendant, the group’s former head of accounting. This was a “conductor” of the fraud. According to the indictment, the three managers, along with other accomplices, formed a gang that falsified Wirecard’s balance sheets and damaged banks’ credit by 3.1 billion euros. 100 days of negotiations are scheduled until 2024. Braun and the former chief accountant deny the allegations.

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