Two Austrians Arrested Over Plan to Help Jan Marsalek Escape from Wirecard

Last week, Vienna police arrested a former senior official of Austria’s intelligence service and a former deputy from the right-wing forces. They are accused of organising the escape of the former Wirecard chief operating officer Jan Marsalek to Belarus last summer, сообщает Financial Times.

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The suspects had been under surveillance for several months. Authorities believe that these individuals organised a private jet that carried Marsalek out of Austria.

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According to their information, the arrested former employee of the Austrian secret service had long been a trusted associate of Marsalek. In the evening of 18 June 2020, a few hours after Marsalek was suspended from duty at Wirecard, they met at a Munich restaurant.

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The next day, Marsalek took a taxi to a private airfield in the Austrian town of Bad-Feslau.

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Delayed by the taxi driver’s difficulty finding the entrance to the small airport, Marsalek paid the two pilots cash and boarded a chartered Cessna Citation Mustang 510, which carried him to Minsk, the police document says.

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Vienna’s public prosecutor’s office confirmed that two people are in custody in connection with Marsalek’s escape, but declined to name them.

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On Sunday, 24 January, another employee of the Federal Agency for Constitutional Protection and Counter-Terrorism (BVT) was arrested, according to the FT and the Vienna prosecutor’s office. This person is believed to have abused their powers by passing confidential information to the payments company.

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In June 2020, Wirecard’s accounts showed a hole of nearly €2 billion. The company subsequently began bankruptcy proceedings.

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The police arrested former Wirecard chief executive Markus Braun.

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The former top executive Jan Marsalek, described as the architect of the accounting fraud, vanished a few days before Munich prosecutors issued an arrest warrant. His whereabouts remain unknown. Some reports say he may have fled to Russia.

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The German General Prosecutor’s Office said that Marsalek со службой госбезопасности Австрии.

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At the end of July, Wirecard investors sued the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin), accusing the regulator of tardy measures against the company. It later emerged that Commerzbank had already in early 2020 предупреждал BaFin о манипуляциях Wirecard, but the regulator took no action.

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In December, the administrator in the Wirecard insolvency case, Michael Jaffé, filed with the court seeking to declare Wirecard’s financial statements for 2017 and 2018 invalid.

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How Wirecard collapsed: dubious clients, falsified reports and a €2bn hole

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