The Munich regional court has been trying to find out the truth in the Wirecard trial for over a year. The major trial surrounding what is believed to be the largest fraud case in Germany will drag on.
The Wirecard trial surrounding what is believed to be the largest accounting fraud case in German post-war history is dragging on. The fourth criminal chamber of the Munich I Regional Court has now scheduled 86 more days of hearings until December 19th of this year. A court spokesman said this upon request.
The trial against the former CEO Markus Braun, the key witness Oliver Bellenhaus and the former chief accountant of the DAX group, which collapsed in 2020, has been running since December 8th, 2022. The chamber had originally scheduled 100 hearing dates, the last of which will be January 10th next week would have been. For the period thereafter, Wednesdays and Thursdays were scheduled as trial days, but no specific dates were planned in the original order.
It’s all about this
Wirecard collapsed in the summer of 2020 after auditors could not find 1.9 billion euros that should be recorded on the balance sheet. According to the prosecution, the money never existed. Braun and his accomplices are said to have acted as a criminal gang to fake transactions in order to keep the actually loss-making company afloat.
However, Braun, who was taken into custody in July 2020 – almost three and a half years ago – has declared himself innocent. According to the Austrian manager, the real criminals around the ex-sales director Jan Marsalek, who went into hiding, and the key witness Bellenhaus, are said to have made huge sums of money to the site.
Braun and Bellenhaus blame each other, and none of the witnesses interviewed so far have been able to shed any light on the matter. It is unclear whether the 1.9 billion euros that have been missing since the summer of 2020 ever existed – and if so, who ultimately embezzled the funds. Key witness Bellenhaus, who has also been in custody since July 2020, denies Braun’s allegations.
Clarification difficult
One of the reasons the investigation is so difficult is that the crime scenes were largely in Asia: in Dubai, Singapore, the Philippines and other Asian countries. The court had summoned numerous witnesses from abroad in recent months, but they did not appear.
So far, mainly former employees of the former Wirecard headquarters in Aschheim near Munich have testified. However, Braun’s ex-subordinates stated across the board that they knew nothing about the billion-dollar fraud.
The first witnesses in the new year will be the former head of the Wirecard Bank’s legal department on January 10th, followed by a former sales manager the following day.
Source: Stern
