Wirecard boss Braun in court
Gangster or “Dumbest CEO Ever”?
By Thomas Schmoll
12/07/2022, 5:01 p.m
The trial against former Wirecard boss Markus Braun, once celebrated as the German Jeff Bezos, begins. His defense strategy boils down to portraying himself as a victim of evil machinations. The court must clarify: Can it really have been like that?
Journalists who have sent inquiries to Markus Braun’s lawyer over the past two years have sometimes had to wait several days for an answer – if it ever came. In responses from Prof. Alfred Dierlamm, it was said that “against the background of the ongoing proceedings”, no statement would be made, “neither in writing nor by telephone”. This was followed by a request in which one could guess whether it was meant in a friendly or threatening manner: “In the context of your reporting, please note that the presumption of innocence applies to Dr. Braun.” As a precaution, a media lawyer stood in the CC.
The former CEO of Wirecard consequently refused to testify before the Bundestag investigative committee. Then the PR consultant Dirk Metz, who acted as Braun’s spokesman, appeared and gave a detailed interview to “Zeit” in May 2021 because – as the questioners quoted him – he wanted to “put a few things straight” for his client. Since the prisoner on remand is in a “very special situation”, he “cannot speak up and defend himself against prejudice. It is important to him, however, to be able to counter misrepresentations from time to time.”
Metz took over, explaining, for example, that the accused did not see himself as “a pale technocrat who became megalomaniac” and was not suitable as a key witness for the prosecution because he had not noticed anything about any machinations. Braun is certain “that a criminal group” has “smuggled out and embezzled immense sums of money” via letterbox companies and offshore accounts from his company. The prison inmate “decidedly values the statement that he knew nothing about these shadow structures and embezzlements”.
Defense attorney believes charges are fabricated
In short: Braun is innocent in Metz’s account, who resigned from office in September. This also corresponds to Dierlamm’s defense strategy. In the course of the criminal proceedings, the lawyer then used the media to comment on the ongoing proceedings. According to his own statements, the law professor submitted a 300-page application to the Munich Regional Court on March 16, 2022 not to open the process. He told the “Handelsblatt” newspaper that if the judges should “objectively examine the procedural material”, i.e. “above all uninfluenced by my client’s public prejudices”, which “unfortunately” has not happened so far, the conclusion can only be that the indictment is fabricated.
The chamber saw it differently, followed the prosecutor’s office and allowed the indictment. Anything else would have been a surprise too. The Munich Higher Regional Court had rejected several of Braun’s complaints, which means that it did not lean towards the accused’s version of the ignorant victim of evil intrigues, but considered the risk of absconding and a guilty verdict to be possible. Most recently, however, it had asked the public prosecutor’s office to end the investigation, otherwise continued detention would no longer be justifiable. Braun, who comes from Austria, has been in prison for two and a half years. In order to leave a suspect in custody for so long, the public prosecutor must present good reasons.
The trial of the fraud of the century begins on Thursday. Wirecard, once celebrated as the German answer to Amazon and Apple, invented sales, invented third-party business: In the end, 1.9 billion euros were missing from the balance sheet. To this day it is unclear whether the amount of money ever existed and where it went. Braun, once celebrated as the German answer to Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs, is accused of commercial gang fraud. With accomplices, he is said to have deceived banks and other financiers, both private and professional, with regard to the financial situation of the former DAX company. Other charges include market manipulation in 26 counts, embezzlement in six counts and balance sheet falsification.
Key witness B
In its press release on the first indictment in the Wirecard complex “against Dr. Markus B. and two other suspects”, the public prosecutor speaks of embellished numbers in public announcements and balance sheets with the aim of driving the share price up and keeping it high. “By the end of 2015 at the latest, it was clear to everyone accused that Wirecard AG was only making losses with the actual, real business, which would ultimately lead to insolvency.”
Now the prosecution has to convince the court that Braun and the two co-defendants from former top management actually formed a gang and profited from the shady dealings. The statements of one of the three accused, who appears as a key witness, will certainly be decisive. Oliver B. traveled voluntarily from the United Arab Emirates to Munich in July 2020 – after the group went bankrupt – to turn himself in. B. was head of the “counterfeiting workshop”, as the Wirecard subsidiary in Dubai is said to have been called internally. According to his own statements, he acted in close coordination with the fugitive ex-board member Jan Marsalek, who is suspected to be in Russia.
According to his defense, Braun should not have been aware of any of the events. Former colleagues had described him – sometimes also as a witness before the investigative committee of the Bundestag – as the strong man at Wirecard who took care of everything himself, even the smallest details, seven days a week. His ex-assistant, as she said, “only had strange jobs” such as organizing children’s birthday parties and opera balls. She sometimes accepted internal calls for Braun. He made most of the calls on his cell phone and received emails directly.
Accounts like these could thwart the defense strategy. A meticulous workaholic who cared about the content of statements on Twitter but had no idea how his company got ripped off? Jörn Leogrande, once an employee of Braun, named two ways of characterizing the former CEO in his book “Bad Company”: gangster or failure. “Either he gives the dumbest CEO ever, namely the manager who doesn’t know where more than 75 percent of his company’s sales really come from. Or he admits that he was (was) involved in a gang-type fraud,” he wrote. Braun decided: “for the first variant”.