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Thursday, October 29, 2020
One of the key figures in the Wirecard balance sheet fraud scandal, Jan Marsalek, is falling into the twilight even more than before: according to the Justice Ministry, the manager in hiding may have been an Austrian agent. Is this the starting point of a diplomatic crisis with Vienna?
Former Wirecard manager Jan Marsalek was likely an undercover agent for the Austrian intelligence service. The Federal Prosecutor General “has evidence that the Austrian citizen Jan Marsalek was included as a confidant by an employee of the Austrian Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Fight Against Terrorism (BVT),” said the response of the Federal Ministry of Justice to a request of the member of the Bundestag Fabio De Masi of the Left Party, on which the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” reports.
In response, however, the ministry added: “So far there have not been sufficient factual indications that Jan Marsalek’s contacts with BVT constitute an act of intelligence agency activity directed against the Federal Republic of Germany or another crime. criminal that is under the responsibility of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office. could. ”
According to the “Süddeutscher Zeitung”, the Austrian Ministry of the Interior, to which the BVT is subordinate, declined to comment. Placing an undercover agent in a DAX company would be an affront and could strain relations between Germany and Austria. Left-wing MP De Masi demanded in the SZ: “The chancellor should pick up the phone as quickly as possible and ask Sebastian Kurz what the Austrians are doing here.”
The former manager of now-insolvent payment service provider Wirecard, Marsalek, has been in hiding since June. Investigators indict Marsalek, former CEO Markus Braun and other suspected gang fraud. He is said to have misled banks and investors with falsified balance sheet figures of more than three billion euros.
