Faster judgment: Court wants to speed up Wirecard process

The Munich I Regional Court wants to accelerate the Wirecard trial, which has been ongoing for over two years and is the largest economic fraud in Germany since 1945. The presiding judge Markus Födisch and the fourth criminal chamber propose in an order to limit themselves to the ten most important accusations. Otherwise, the trial against former Wirecard CEO Markus Braun and two other managers of the Dax group that collapsed in 2022, which opened on December 8, 2022, would not end before 2026, according to the judges. A spokesman for the court confirmed a corresponding report in the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”.

Prosecutors must agree

According to the indictment, the perpetrators fabricated billions in sales for years in order to keep the actually loss-making payment service provider afloat. The Munich public prosecutor’s office estimates the damage to the lending banks at a good three billion euros. In order for the mammoth trial to end more quickly, the public prosecutor would have to give the court its consent. According to “SZ”, the investigative authority wants to comment in the course of January.

The key points for the judgment, to which the chamber now wants to limit itself, still include a whole series of allegations. These include, among other things, the falsification of the consolidated financial statements for 2016, 2017 and 2018, false information on the capital market, breach of trust and fraud on the part of the lending banks. In the original indictment, the allegations against the former CEO Braun alone include 43 different points.

83 days of negotiations scheduled this year

The chamber had recently extended the trial for another year and scheduled 83 new days of hearings. What is controversial in the process is not that there was criminality in Wirecard management, but rather the question of who was the perpetrator. Braun, who has been in custody for four and a half years, categorically rejects all allegations and, for his part, blames a group of perpetrators around ex-board member Jan Marsalek, who went into hiding, and co-defendant Oliver Bellenhaus.