Jan Marsalek sends unsolicited letter to judges in Wirecard trial

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Jan Marsalek, one of the world’s most wanted white collar criminal suspects and former Wirecard executive, has sent an unsolicited letter giving his opinion about the evidence presented against his former colleagues to the judges presiding over their trial in Munich.

Marsalek’s German lawyer submitted a letter on his client’s behalf to the court, according to spokespeople for the Munich district court and the city’s public prosecution office.

The letter is the first known interaction by the 43-year-old Marsalek with German authorities since he fled to Austria and Belarus in June 2020, days before Wirecard crashed into insolvency after admitting that €1.9bn of cash did not exist.

Marsalek’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Two people familiar with the letter said it was sent in recent weeks and in it Marsalek asserted the existence of Wirecard’s outsourcing operations in Asia — backing the view of his former boss Markus Braun and contrary to the opinion of Wirecard’s administrator and Munich criminal prosecutors.

Marsalek also claimed that the testimony from his former Dubai-based colleague Oliver Bellenhaus, who is the prosecutors’ chief witness, was not accurate on all accounts, according to the same people.

Another person familiar with the matter told the Financial Times that it was unclear if the letter, which was first reported by Wirtschaftswoche, would be incorporated into the trial.

The court case against Braun, Bellenhaus and Wirecard’s former head of accounting Stephan von Erffa started in December and is expected to run at least until mid-2024. If found guilty, the three men could each face up to 15 years in jail.

Prosecutors accuse Braun, Marsalek and others of having fraudulently inflated Wirecard’s sales to raise more than €3bn in debt, citing Bellenhaus’s testimony as evidence.

Marsalek took a private jet from a small airport in Austria to Minsk in Belarus where trace of him was lost. He was the executive who was directly in charge of the outsourced business at the centre of the fraud allegations which on paper accounted for half of Wirecard’s revenue and all of its profits.

During their testimonies, Braun and Bellenhaus implicated Marsalek, who cannot be tried in absentia under German law. He is one of six Austrian citizens on Interpol’s “Red Notice” list of the world’s most wanted suspects.

In March 2021, Germany’s foreign intelligence service shunned an offer to meet Marsalek in Moscow, fearing that the invitation to talk to the fugitive was a trap set up by Russia’s FSB spy agency. In the same year, Munich police investigated a €80,000 payment from a bank account in Dubai to the landlord of Marsalek’s fiancée in Munich, which came with the reference “für Jan” (“on behalf of Jan”).