Wirecard’s former CEO Markus Braun will go on trial from December 8 to answer fraud charges in Germany‘s biggest-ever accounting scandal, a Munich court said.
Austrian-born Braun stands accused of “commercial gang fraud”, embezzlement and market manipulation for his role in Wirecard’s spectacular collapse two years ago.
The higher regional court in Munich said it had scheduled 100 court dates for the mammoth trial.
Once the standard-bearer for the German tech industry, payments firm Wirecard was plunged into chaos in 2020 after admitting that 1.9 billion euros ($1.9-billion) missing from its balance sheets likely didn’t exist.
The scandal was “unparallelled” in Germany’s post-war history, according to then finance minister Olaf Scholz, who is now chancellor.
Braun, who has been in custody for over two years, denies the allegations.
Two other Wirecard managers, accounting boss Stephan von Erffa and Oliver Bellenhaus, the former head of Wirecard’s Dubai subsidiary, were also charged with fraud last March.
The trio had worked “in an industrial fashion” to commit the fraud, German prosecutors said at the time. The accused face “several years” in prison if found guilty, they added.
Wirecard’s chief operating officer Jan Marsalek, who has been on the run since the firm’s collapse, is still wanted by German prosecutors.
He was reported earlier this year to be hiding out in Moscow.
The time it took for German prosecutors to file formal charges against Braun underlined the complex web of fraudulent transactions implicating Wirecard subsidiaries and third-party companies that took investigators across the world to unravel.
Among victims of the fraud were banks that had provided credit of 1.7 billion euros to Wirecard. Bonds worth 1.4 billion euros had also been issued and are unlikely to be repaid.
All the accused group members were acting in an industrial fashion… that is how they secured their own salaries, including partially profit-related portions,” prosecutors said.
Source: eNCA
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