a “mastermind” who had “come across the German financial scene like the Holy Spirit.” But it was not regulators or auditors who ultimately took the company down it was a reporter and his editors, in London.ĭan McCrum often jokes that his marriage was a minor fraud-his wife met him when he was a banker, but she ended up with a journalist instead. The German business newspaper Handelsblatt called Wirecard’s C.E.O. Wirecard’s rising stock price was regarded as a sign that the business was dependable, that its critics were clueless or corrupt. “German politicians were proud to be able to say, Hey, we have a fintech company!” Florian Toncar, a German parliamentarian, observed. Wirecard represented the nation’s challenge to Silicon Valley, its leap into financial technology and the digital era. The country’s traditional industry is in cars and energy systems-BMW, Volkswagen, Daimler, Siemens. It was against this backdrop that German institutions supported Wirecard. (Upstart’s share price has since dropped by ninety-five per cent.) In late 2021, amid the investing frenzy, a CNBC guest-the author of such books as “Trade Like a Stock Market Wizard” and “Think & Trade Like a Champion,” who charges people a thousand dollars a month for “private access” to his market research-recommended a tech company called Upstart, asserting that its earnings were “very powerful” and that the company had “a good-looking name.” Redditors shared their YOLO trades offshore crypto exchanges posted their own tokens as collateral for multibillion-dollar loans. The venture-capital and tech worlds, awash in easy money, developed a culture of selling narratives and vaporware-lofty and sometimes fantastical ideas, with no clear path to implementation. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, governments sought to revive depressed economies, and central banks suppressed interest rates, making it cheaper for businesses to get loans. Rather, it reflected a convergence of factors that made the past half decade “the golden age of fraud,” as the hedge-fund manager Jim Chanos has put it. The rise of Wirecard did not occur in a vacuum. His departure from Bad Vöslau is the last instance in which he is known to have used his real name. Although Austrians generally aren’t allowed dual citizenship, Marsalek held at least eight passports, including diplomatic cover from the tiny Caribbean nation of Grenada. But, like almost everything about Wirecard, the records had been faked. Philippine immigration records show that Jan Marsalek entered the country four days later, on June 23rd. He carried only hand luggage, paid the pilots nearly eight thousand euros in cash, and declined to take a receipt. Marsalek arrived at the Bad Vöslau airfield just before 8 P.M. The next day, another former Austrian intelligence officer allegedly drove Marsalek some two hundred and fifty miles east. Weiss called a far-right former Austrian parliamentarian and asked him to arrange a private jet for Marsalek, leaving from a small airfield near Vienna. Until recently, Weiss had served as the head of operations for Austria’s intelligence agency now he trafficked in information at the intersection of politics, finance, and crime. That night, Marsalek met a friend, Martin Weiss, for pizza in Munich. Before leaving the office that day, he told people that he was going to Manila, to track down the money. The missing funds had supposedly been parked in two banks in the Philippines, and Wirecard’s Asia operations were under Marsalek’s purview. The Wirecard board placed Marsalek on temporary leave. There were only two possibilities: the money had been stolen, or it had never existed. The sum amounted to all the profits that Wirecard had ever reported as a public company. Then, on June 18, 2020, Wirecard announced that nearly two billion euros was missing from the company’s accounts. When Wirecard wanted to acquire a Chinese company, Chancellor Angela Merkel personally took up the matter with President Xi Jinping. The company eventually earned the confidence of Germany’s political and financial élite, who considered it Europe’s answer to PayPal. He had no formal qualifications or work experience, but he showed an inexhaustible devotion to Wirecard’s growth. He had joined in 2000, on his twentieth birthday, when it was a startup. Marsalek’s identity was inextricable from that of the company, a global payment processor that was headquartered outside Munich and had a banking license. But he would say that to almost everyone. Even at his busiest, as the chief operating officer of Wirecard, Germany’s fastest-growing financial-technology company, he would assure subordinates who sought a minute of his time that he had one, just for them. He was a widely admired figure in the European business community-charismatic, trilingual, and well travelled. Late in the spring of 2020, Jan Marsalek, an Austrian bank executive, was suspended from his job.
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