LETTER FROM VIENNA
With his financial ace face, piercing gaze and suit and tie, he stands out on the list of people most wanted by the German police. Disappeared in the wild since June 2020, Jan Marsalek, former flamboyant number two of the online payment company Wirecard, placed bankrupt after considerable accounting fraud, is still at the top of the targets of the criminal police, officially wanted for “ organized gang fraud involving billions of euros.”
But if this 43-year-old Austrian is so sought after, it is also because he had become a high-flying spy in the pay of Russia. “It was one of their very, very big assets”, even believes Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist specializing in Russian espionage, who for three and a half years has been tracking the incredible journey of this spy-businessman whose trace was lost on June 19, 2020 on a small airfield south of Vienna. A few hours after the extent of the fraud committed at Wirecard headquarters in Munich was revealed, he boarded a private jet. Destination: Belarus.
Since then, the successive revelations about his profile each time exceed the already thrilling content of the documentary that Netflix dedicated to Wirecard in 2022. In a new part published Friday 1er March, Grozev and his colleagues from the weekly Der Spiegel reveal for example that Marsalek would have started working for the GRU, the Russian intelligence services, after having started in 2013 a romantic relationship with a former second-rate film actress, Natalia Zlobina. Zlobina, who played the role of a spy at age 13 in an American drama called Red Lips II (Donald Farmer, 1996), would have switched to real espionage and “hooked” Marsalek by introducing him to his contacts within the GRU.
As head of one of the most prominent German digital companies, Marsalek had access to a lot of sensitive financial data. But above all he would have sought to collaborate with Russian military intelligence out of fascination with the world of espionage. “Everyone who knew him well says that he wanted to be more than rich: he wanted to disrupt the world.says Grozev. Thanks to Wirecard, he had access to data and he had skills potentially useful to any intelligence service: he offered them to the Russians because they could offer him things that no other service could offer him. »
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