Wirecard trial before the summer break
Defense attorneys are calling for the release of ex-boss Braun
8/3/2023 5:01 p.m
The Munich district court has been negotiating the Wirecard fraud scandal for eight months, but there has so far been no unequivocal evidence against the former CEO Braun. His lawyer now calls the process a “farce” and requests that it be suspended.
In the Munich Wirecard trial, the defenders of ex-CEO Markus Braun are demanding the release of the manager, who has been in custody for three years. Lawyer Alfred Dierlamm applied to the Munich I District Court for the suspension of the arrest warrant and for the entire trial to be suspended, accusing the judiciary of serious mistakes. The defender spoke of a “farce”. “In fact, the payment flows (at Wirecard) were not evaluated.”
“Even after more than three years of proceedings, the judicial authorities have not – not even remotely – clarified the true picture of the crime and the embezzlement of Wirecard assets in the millions,” said Dierlamm. “On the contrary: They do everything to maintain the false narrative of Dr. Braun as a ‘gang leader’.”
In the past three years, the public prosecutor’s office has applied for an extension of the pre-trial detention in every examination. Now the prosecutors want to comment on the suspension of the arrest warrant within a week. The court had already rejected a suspension of the proceedings in January – and reaffirmed this decision before lawyer Dierlamm called for the suspension for the second time.
Who was part of the gang?
According to the indictment, Braun and his accomplices are said to have invented billions in sales with so-called third-party partner companies (TPA) that processed credit card payments in Asian countries on behalf of Wirecard. Trusting in the allegedly high level of profitability, the banks granted the group loans of a good three billion euros, but a large part of these loans was lost with the insolvency.
The main basis of the prosecution are the statements of the key witness Oliver Bellenhaus, former Wirecard managing director in Dubai. “This picture of the crime has been proven to be wrong because it assumes the wrong motive, the wrong structure and the wrong composition of the gang,” said defense attorney Dierlamm.
Braun’s defense attorneys want to prove that Jan Marsalek, who has been in hiding since the summer of 2020, key witness Bellenhaus and numerous accomplices were the villains, while Braun was an unsuspecting victim. According to the defense, this gang is said to have embezzled two billion euros from real transactions without Braun’s involvement or knowledge. “Dr. Braun is doing everything possible in his situation to clarify what actually happened and will continue to do so,” said Dierlamm. “The further execution of the pre-trial detention is disproportionate.”
process could take a long time
It is already foreseeable that the process could take considerably longer than the 100 negotiation days planned for January. In a side note, the presiding judge Markus Födisch declared that a conclusion before the end of 2024 was “realistic”. After 58 days of trial, the process is now taking its first longer break since it started last December, and the next trial day is August 30th.
Braun’s defense attorneys are still awaiting a decision from the court on a mountain of well over 400 applications for evidence with which the lawyers want to prove their client’s innocence. Virtually nothing has changed in the initial situation since the trial began on December 8, 2022: Braun protests his innocence, his defense attorneys accuse co-defendant and key witness Oliver Bellenhaus as a liar. The former Wirecard chief accountant as the third accused is silent.
So far, none of the many witnesses have been able to provide more details about Braun’s activities. Written evidence that the Austrian manager instigated his subordinates to commit criminal acts or knew about them is also missing. Instead, the witnesses have so far painted the picture of a CEO who either didn’t care or didn’t want to care about day-to-day business, leaving it largely to Marsalek.
“Pornography was normal”
There were allegations that Wirecard was not doing the right thing more than a decade before the bankruptcy, but Braun dismissed any criticism. Wirecard processed credit card payments at the interface between merchants and banks. It also became clear in the process that the group, which was once considered a German technological miracle, processed payments from gambling providers and sex websites as a service provider until the end: “Pornography was completely normal for us,” admitted a former employee of internal auditing on the witness stand Protocol.
Marsalek and Co. are said to have managed to secretly divert customer and third-party sales into their own network of shadow companies without Braun and the honest majority of Wirecard employees getting wind of it. However, the witnesses have so far provided no evidence that Wirecard employees have ever referred customers or interested parties to third-party companies, whether real or fake. “Nobody knew the TPA partners and nobody knew what was supposed to be conveyed,” said the former auditor. Insolvency administrator Michael Jaffé has so far found no trace of the missing billions. The Munich lawyer has not yet been called as a witness, and his testimony could be a key moment in the process.