“I had nothing to do with it”
Witness incriminates Wirecard board member Marsalek
January 24, 2024, 5:00 p.m
He trusted Jan Marsalek, says a witness in the Wirecard trial who traveled from Southeast Asia. The Japanese provides insight into the business practices of the failed financial service provider. Manager Tomiee keeps his own role small. The presiding judge considers this to be unbelievable.
In the Wirecard trial, the first witness to arrive from Southeast Asia supported the central accusation of sham transactions. According to the manager Yoshio Tomiie, who was invited from Malaysia, the former Wirecard sales director Jan Marsalek, who has been in hiding since 2020, was significantly involved in the founding of the Singapore Senjo group of companies. The 64-year-old Japanese said this in front of the Munich I Regional Court.
According to the indictment, Senjo was one of the company constructs through which non-existent credit card payments were processed. Tomiie worked for the Senjo Group for several years. According to the manager’s statement, which was translated by interpreters, their subsidiary Senjo Payment had neither the technology nor the staff to process payment transactions: There was no payment gateway and no servers in the building, said the 64-year-old on the 96th day of the trial. “The employees were missing, they didn’t exist.”
A company in the Senjo network of companies is said to have contributed a large part of the Wirecard Group’s sales as a so-called third party partner (TPA). However, the Munich public prosecutor’s office is convinced that Wirecard’s board members invented these transactions in order to whitewash the actually loss-making company. “I trusted Jan Marsalek,” said the witness.
Former CEO Markus Braun, manager Oliver Bellenhaus, who formerly worked for Wirecard in Dubai, and the former chief accountant of the DAX group that collapsed in 2020 have been on trial in Munich for more than a year. According to the indictment, as a commercial fraud gang, they, together with Marsalek and other accomplices, only faked the billions in sales with third-party partners in the Middle East and Asia. Three of these companies played a significant role: Al Alam in Dubai, Payeasy in the Philippines and the Senjo Group in Singapore, for which Tomiie worked.
“Senjo” means battlefield
The presiding judge Markus Födisch presented Tomiie with a list of alleged sales of the Senjo Group with Japanese corporate customers from the investigation files. “I should have noticed it if it existed,” Tomiie said. Braun denies all allegations. The Austrian, who has been in custody for three and a half years, accuses Marsalek and Bellenhaus of embezzling immense sums of money from real transactions without his knowledge and without his involvement.
According to Braun’s defense attorneys, the three third-party partner companies were Marsalek’s creations. This is said to have then led Braun to believe that they were external business partners. According to Tomiies, Marsalek was also behind the founding of the Senjo Group. Marsalek, who has been in hiding since 2020, even came up with the name of the group of companies. “Koyasan” suggested it first, said Tomiie. “This is a sacred Buddhist mountain in Japan”. That’s why it wasn’t possible.
Then Marsalek decided on “Senjo”, also a mountain in the Japanese Alps, but with no religious significance for Buddhists. Additionally, the word “Senjo” means “battlefield” in Tomiie’s words. “So I said, that’s fine.” However, Tomiie’s own role remained open. Chairman Födisch asked the witness several times what he and the other Senjo employees had actually done: “They must have done something.”
“That’s why I came here”
According to his interpreter, the Japanese was “nominee director”, i.e. pro forma boss. However, he did not live in Singapore, where the Senjo Group is based, but in Malaysia. “People have said I’ve been pretty stupid,” he admitted. “But a director is a director. That’s why I came here.” The division of tasks in the planned expansion into Myanmar consisted of Marsalek delivering the drafts of a presentation and he, Tomiie, speaking to the central bank director there.
There were no specific working hours associated with his monthly salary at the time of 15,000 Singapore dollars (a good 10,000 euros at today’s exchange rate). When asked by Judge Födisch about other business transactions, he replied: “I had nothing to do with it. It must have been Jan who set it up.” The judge made it clear that, in his opinion, Tomiie knew more than he wanted to say on the witness stand: “I don’t understand if you don’t know anything about the decisions,” sighed the chairman.
The majority of witnesses heard in the first year of the trial were former Wirecard employees from Germany who could not say anything concrete about the accusations. Foreign witnesses who were closer to the crime in the Middle East – or like Tomiie – in Southeast Asia could know more. But most of the foreign witnesses summoned so far have not even responded to the summons, let alone appeared in the underground Munich courtroom in the Stadelheim prison.