Billion-dollar fraud: Wirecard trial: Final deadline for the defenders

Munich. After almost four years, the Munich Wirecard trial surrounding the largest fraud scandal in German post-war history is entering its final phase. The judges want to give the defense lawyers of the former CEO Markus Braun and the two co-defendants a two-week deadline for their final applications for evidence. This is what the presiding judge Markus Födisch said on the 289th day of the mammoth trial.

As things stand, the chamber wants to announce this deadline on November 11th. If there are no more new requests for evidence, Födisch will plan the public prosecutor's plea with their criminal proposals for the three defendants. However, there are no set dates for pleas and verdicts yet.

The chamber has recently rejected a series of requests for evidence, some of which were made years ago, as well as the suspension of the trial requested by Braun's defense lawyers. Wirecard filed for bankruptcy in June 2020 because credit balances of 1.7 billion euros recorded on the balance sheet could not be found - to date, insolvency administrator Michael Jaffé has no evidence that the money ever existed. According to the indictment, Braun and accomplices fabricated non-existent sales over the years in order to deceive the lending banks. The public prosecutor's office estimated the damage caused by the fraud at three billion euros.

The manager Oliver Bellenhaus, who formerly worked for Wirecard in Dubai, confirmed the public prosecutor's account in all essential points. The former CEO Braun, who has been in custody for over six years, has denied all allegations since the beginning of the trial. The Austrian manager, born in 1969, defended himself by arguing that the transactions were genuine, but that the profits had been embezzled by Marsalek and accomplices.

The third defendant is the former chief accountant E., who, like Braun, contradicts the accusation. Judge Födisch recently confronted E. with obviously fake account balances of 660 million euros from March 2018, which were addressed to the chief accountant and in which the date was not even correct. The Wirecard trustee in Singapore had allegedly already sent his confirmation of the account balances from December 2017 in March 2017 - an impossibility. A day later, E. received a corrected version with the correct date, but in which the alleged account balances had been changed by millions. E. had said that he had not been involved in the details and had no explanation for it.