The Munich public prosecutor’s office is targeting two other board members of the insolvent payment processor Wirecard. The investigators have filed charges against the former CFO Alexander von Knoop and Susanne Steidl, who was responsible for product development on the board at the time, as the Munich I public prosecutor’s office announced. The charges concern breach of trust in several cases, and in the case of von Knoop also aiding and abetting breach of trust. Von Knoop and Steidl are said to have approved loans and other payments to obscure business partners “out of the blue” without any detailed investigation on the Wirecard board, even though some of them were in arrears with the interest and the repayment of the loans was questionable.
“Due to all these acts of embezzlement, Wirecard AG suffered losses of several hundred million euros,” the public prosecutor’s office said in a statement. The 12th Commercial Criminal Division of the Munich Regional Court will decide whether the two will have to answer in court. Wirecard went bankrupt in June 2020 after alleged balances of over 1.9 billion euros in the Philippines turned out to be non-existent. The bankruptcy is one of the biggest financial scandals in post-war German history.
Former CEO Markus Braun, the then deputy CFO Stephan von Erffa and Wirecard’s representative in Asia, Oliver Bellenhaus, are currently on trial in Munich for fraud and accounting fraud. According to the public prosecutor and insolvency administrator, the missing billions were completely fictitious. Bellenhaus has largely admitted the allegations, while Braun and von Erffa deny them.
Russia, Philippines, Singapore
Former board member Jan Marsalek, who was at the center of the machinations as the person responsible for the Asian business, left after the bankruptcy and is believed to be in Russia. At the end of 2023, the public prosecutor’s office brought charges against von Knoop’s predecessor Burkhard Ley. They accuse him of, among other things, falsifying accounts, market manipulation, fraud and breach of trust. Ley denies any complicity. In the case of von Knoop and Steidl, it is only a matter of breach of trust.
The law firm representing Steidl did not want to comment on the charges. As a witness in the trial against Braun, it had incriminated Marsalek. He had antagonized von Knoop by transferring the money in the alleged trust accounts from Singapore to the Philippines. It had no insight into the third-party business in Asia. Von Knoop was not immediately available for comment. He has not yet appeared as a witness in the trial. He had testified before a parliamentary committee of inquiry that he had known nothing about criminal activities. Marsalek was the sole person responsible for this on the board.
