Wirecard insider Leogrande: Then the bosses "took the wrong turn"

With Wirecard, Jörn Leogrande rose within 15 years from a freelance marketing consultant to head of innovation in a DAX group. Hardly anyone knows the scandalous company as well as he does – or at least part of it. Because there were, so to speak, two Wirecards, says Leogrande in an ntv.de interview. So that the "other dimension" of Wirecard does not fall into oblivion after the headlines about the accounting scandal, he wrote a book about his career in the "Bad Company".

ntv.de: More than half a year after the collapse of Wirecard in the course of the billions in balance sheet fraud, you are presenting a book about your 15 years in the scandalous group. Do you want to justify yourself for having been a high-ranking employee for a long time, or do you want to settle accounts with those responsible?

Jörn Leogrande started a position in marketing at Wirecard in 2005 and will soon be Head of Marketing. In 2017 he became head of Wirecard's global innovation department. His book "Bad Company" will be published on February 8th by Penguin Verlag.

Jörn Leogrande: Neither. Above all, I want to authentically portray the Wirecard company, some of which my colleagues have worked for many years of their lives. The Wirecard news is all about the great balance sheet fraud and the people at the top who are alleged to have committed it. About Markus Braun and especially Jan Marsalek, as a presumed mastermind with excellent connections to international secret services. Not only did I get to know these people very differently, but also worked like thousands of colleagues in a completely different company than the one that is now being reported about so much.

To what extent another company?

It was one and the same group, but Wirecard had what I would call two dimensions. There was this third-party business in Asia, which, under the responsibility of Jan Marsalek and quite a few insiders, – allegedly – generated huge sales, and where the billions of fraud allegedly took place. And then there were the payment services for customers in Germany, Europe and other markets, on which I and almost all the other employees at headquarters worked. These two parts were completely separate, and the payment flows, for example, in terms of personnel and technology, ran through different systems. With the allegedly fraudulent part of Wirecard, the other part also went under and is completely forgotten in view of the scandal.

In your book you also describe in detail your career at Wirecard since your first day at work in 2005 at the then still small startup Wirecard or the predecessor company. What you describe is not illegal, but it is not a pleasant working environment and sometimes shady business with online gambling providers. Violent racist abuses by at least one manager also occur.

Wirecard has changed a lot since I started at the company 15 years ago. When I came to the office on my first day at work, there were an estimated 150 colleagues there. There were some very weird birds among them. I didn't like some of the way things were back then. But I think that wasn't unusual for such a young, ambitious tech booth at the time. And over the years Wirecard has not only grown, but – at least the area in which I worked – has become more professional and serious. The Wirecard, which eventually rose to the Dax, was completely different from the small company I had started with at the time.

Why did you stay in this often problematic and sometimes uncomfortable environment for years?

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As employees, we were part of an incredible success, at least that's what everyone believed. Imagine the mood when the company was included in the Dax. What an advancement story! The media were full of how this modern payment booth replaced the old Commerzbank in the first division. Politicians and board members of large corporations got together at the Wirecard headquarters in Aschheim. And personally, as the head of the innovation department, I was one of the faces of the group and always there. My career before Wirecard hadn't started spectacularly at all. I was a freelance journalist and marketing consultant. At which other company could I have taken on the responsibility to develop projects and implement my own ideas?

Your work at Wirecard and that of the vast majority of employees on payment services for well-known partners, for example Aldi or Deutsche Telekom, wasn't that just a facade from the start for what you call the other dimension of Wirecard, the billion-dollar fraud with Asian third-party business?

No, I do not think so. I worked personally with Jan Marsalek for years, and at times reported directly to Markus Braun. I think they really had the vision as a tech company to move up to the top of the Google or Facebook dimension. But when that didn't work, among other things because the margins for payment services are simply far too low, they took a wrong turn at some point.

At first, as you write, you were Marsalek's "design boy", with Braun you were on the same page. Then both drew closer and closer to the circle of their confidants. You too have hardly had any personal contact in recent years. Was that the point where management "took the wrong turn," as you put it? Didn't you suspect that there was a second, illegal dimension to Wirecard?

First of all, from my point of view, it was part of the growth and development of Wirecard that the distance between employees and corporate management increased. The fact that at a certain point I no longer reported directly to the CEO but to a new member of the board was, in my opinion, completely normal. There was nothing suspicious about that. Many knew that this apparently extremely profitable third-party business existed in Asia and that it was strictly separated from our work, our servers and systems. I suspected nothing illegal behind this, but rather that it was a question of payment services for partners with whom the name of the outwardly reputable Dax promoter Wirecard should not be associated, i.e. online casinos, porn sites or something.

You personally know Jan Marsalek, the alleged mastermind behind the billions in fraud. Does his image in the media, as an unscrupulous puller, correspond to the person you have worked with for years?

On the one hand, Jan is probably one of the most brilliant minds I have ever worked with. He is extremely quick to grasp. He immediately notices the smallest errors in a design. He was always there when there was a problem to be solved. Sometimes he himself created presentations for customers overnight. In the past, even as a board member, he had no real staff, no speakers. Jan practically did everything himself. On the other hand, his attention span was very small. If a project was initially about operational implementation, he quickly got bored. Naturally, this increased with the growth and consolidation of structures at Wirecard. He also lost interest in me personally, I believe, because as a family man I couldn't keep up with his extreme speed and workload, and didn't want to be on duty around the clock every day. I've hardly seen him in the last few years.

How surprised were you with the allegations against Jan Marsalek and the descriptions of his life, from an alleged private army in Libya to escapades in his villa? Have you never heard of it?

I got to know Jan as an extremely friendly, charming person. He was a master of small talk. But I couldn't see behind this facade. Jan always kept Wirecard strictly separate from his private life. I didn't even know about the existence of this villa, let alone private armies or intelligence contacts.

Max Borowski spoke to Jörn Leogrande.

. (tagsToTranslate) Economy (t) Wirecard (t) Insolvency