Chief witness in Wirecard trial denies deleting data before talking to police

The chief witness in the Wirecard trial has rejected allegations that he destroyed incriminating data before reporting himself to the police.

Oliver Bellenhaus, the former head of a Dubai-based subsidiary at the centre of a fraud that caused the collapse of the payments group, told judges on Wednesday that the lawyer of former Wirecard chief executive Markus Braun was trying to undermine him by distorting facts that were taken out of context. “There are desperate attempts to cast a doubt about my credibility,” he said.

Alfred Dierlamm, Braun’s lead lawyer, last week accused Bellenhaus of deleting key data on servers based in Dubai. Dierlamm argued that the data would have proved the existence of Wirecard’s outsourced business in Asia, which on paper generated half of the payment group’s revenue and €1.9bn in cash. He also argued that the alleged destruction of evidence showed Bellenhaus was not a trustworthy witness but was presenting a “pack of lies”.

Braun, Bellenhaus and Wirecard’s former head of accounting Stephan von Erffa were charged with fraud, embezzlement, and market and accounting manipulation in a Munich court earlier this month. If found guilty, they face up to 15 years in jail. The case to a large extent hinges on Bellenhaus’s testimony and credibility.

Bellenhaus told the judges on Wednesday that he did not delete any data on local servers in Dubai.

“What I did was shutting down the servers once the auditors were done with their work,” he said, claiming that a reference to his alleged deletion of files, in a report by Wirecard’s compliance team written after the business collapsed, was based on a “misunderstanding” of a statement by one of his colleagues.

That person “only told [Wirecard’s compliance] that the servers were shut down,” Bellenhaus insisted.

He had told the court on Monday that he built shadow IT infrastructure in Dubai to make Wirecard’s auditor EY think the outsourced operations were real. He said that he shipped old Wirecard servers from Munich to Dubai for this purpose and bought some used servers on Ebay, but added that the infrastructure lacked the IT certificates necessary to perform payment-related tasks.

Later, he and some colleagues manually forged data from 200mn credit card transactions to deceive KPMG during a forensic audit. Bellenhaus said that it would have been unnecessary to fabricate that data if the outsourced business had been real.

Bellenhaus, in line with Wirecard’s administrator and the public prosecutors, argued that the so-called third-party acquiring (TPA) business did not exist and was invented to deceive auditors, investors and creditors.

Dierlamm asserted that the TPA operations were real and accused Bellenhaus and Wirecard’s fugitive second-in-command Jan Marsalek of having embezzled the proceeds without Braun’s knowledge.

Bellenhaus on Wednesday also rejected allegations by Dierlamm that he did not disclose a private foundation in Liechtenstein right away to prosecutors. He argued that the money that was wired to that account from a shell company in Antigua was a “bonus” for him that was approved by Marsalek and “probably as well by Braun”.

He also told the judges that payments he received from a UK-based company that Dierlamm had called “another apparent pool for embezzling money” were in fact part of his official Wirecard salary.

“A quick Google search would have shown that the money was coming from a large service firm specialised in executing salary payments,” he said, adding that the money was pay for his job as a board member of a UK-based Wirecard subsidiary.

Bellenhaus insisted that a portfolio of bonds as well as cash that he transferred to his wife in late 2019 were funded solely from his Wirecard salary and not from funds embezzled from the company, as Dierlamm had suggested on Monday. Moreover, Bellenhaus pointed out that Braun and von Erffa also transferred assets to family members ahead of Wirecard’s collapse.

The trial continues on Wednesday and will then restart in January.