Two former Wirecard board members are said to have had no involvement in the alleged multi-billion dollar fraud that lasted for years. However, they are still being charged.
After more than four years of investigations into the Wirecard scandal, the Munich public prosecutor’s office has charged two more former board members of the Wirecard Group, which collapsed in 2020. The investigators accuse the former CFO Alexander von Knoop and the manager Susanne Steidl, who was formerly responsible for product development on the Wirecard board, of several cases of breach of trust with losses of several hundred million euros for the former DAX group. The two are said to have been involved in board decisions to award company funds to Wirecard business partners without collateral. In the next step, the Munich I Regional Court must now decide on the admission of the charges.
However, investigators do not believe that the two were involved in the alleged billion-dollar fraud for which former CEO Markus Braun and two other former Wirecard managers have been on trial in Munich since December 2022. Knoops’ lawyers stressed that the former CFO had “never been aware of any machinations to the detriment of Wirecard AG and its shareholders by other responsible persons in the Wirecard Group.” “At no time did Mr. von Knoop have the intention or even the idea of harming companies in the Wirecard Group through his actions.” A spokesman for Steidl said he could not comment on ongoing proceedings.
Steidl and von Knoop were promoted to the Wirecard board in January 2018, long after Braun, according to investigations by the public prosecutor’s office, had formed a gang of fraudsters together with several accomplices inside and outside the group. Steidl, who is from Austria like Braun and former sales director Jan Marsalek, who has been in hiding since 2020, had also personally emphasized as a witness in the trial that she had known nothing about the fraud.
The Wirecard gang, suspected by the public prosecutor, with Braun and Marsalek in key roles, is said to have inflated the payment service provider’s balance sheets for years with fictitious fictitious transactions in order to keep the actually loss-making company afloat. According to the prosecution, the victims were mainly the lending banks, and the public prosecutor’s office estimates the fraud damage at a good three billion euros. Braun has denied all allegations since the trial began.
The main accusation: lending without collateral
Even though Steidl and von Knoop were not privy to the billion-dollar fraud, they are said to have violated their duties because they gave out company funds almost in the dark. Among other things, this involves a loan of 100 million euros that, according to the public prosecutor’s office, Wirecard transferred to a Singapore company called Ocap in spring 2020 without collateral. According to the findings so far in the trial against Braun, Ocap was part of a difficult-to-understand network of companies through which Wirecard funds were channeled back and forth, only to eventually disappear into dark channels. At the end of 2023, the Munich I public prosecutor’s office had already charged von Knoop’s predecessor as CFO.
Source: Stern
