Brown comes to court
Justice confirms charges against ex-Wirecard boss
03/14/2022, 11:09 am
With Markus Braun, the alleged key figure in the Wirecard accounting fraud scandal is now being brought to justice. The Munich public prosecutor confirms that the ex-manager will be charged.
More than a year and a half after the bankruptcy of the former DAX group Wirecard, the Munich public prosecutor’s office brought fraud charges against the former CEO Markus Braun. This was announced by the authority and thus confirmed media reports from Sunday. The investigators accuse Braun and two other former Wirecard managers of “gang-like behavior”.
They are said to have falsified balance sheets and damaged lending banks by a total of EUR 3.1 billion since 2015 – of which EUR 1.7 billion was in loans and another EUR 1.4 billion in bonds. According to the indictment, Braun knowingly signed the false balance sheets. Braun’s lawyer initially had no comment.
The Austrian has been in custody without interruption since July 22, 2020. The Munich Higher Regional Court had urged the public prosecutor’s office to file charges as soon as possible during the last regular detention review, since pre-trial detainees should not be in prison for an unnecessarily long time without a verdict. Before the trial begins, the next step is for the Munich Regional Court to decide whether the charges will be admitted.
Braun sees himself as a victim
Wirecard filed for bankruptcy at the end of June 2020 after the company had admitted air bookings of 1.9 billion euros – the money could not be found and has disappeared to this day. The alleged balance sheet fraud also helped Wirecard to climb into the Dax in 2018.
As far as is known, Braun sees himself as a victim. In civil lawsuits before the Munich district court, for example, it became clear that Braun still assumes that the missing 1.9 billion actually exist. In addition to Braun, the key figure in the affair is the former sales director Jan Marsalek, who fled abroad in the summer of 2020 and has been in hiding ever since. Marsalek is being investigated elsewhere, he has not yet been charged.
There have been allegations of manipulation against Wirecard for many years, and the scandal was uncovered by the British “Financial Times”. Braun himself was ruined by the collapse of his company, since he had invested almost his entire fortune in Wirecard shares.