He’s Wanted for Wirecard’s Missing $2 Billion. He’s Now Suspected of Being a Russian Spy.
BERLIN—Soon after payment-processing giant Wirecard reported in June 2020 that nearly $2 billion had gone missing from its balance sheet, its chief operating officer Jan Marsalek boarded a private jet out of Austria. After a landing in Belarus, he was whisked by car to Moscow, where he got a Russian passport under an assumed name. Western intelligence and security officials now say they have reached the unsettling conclusion that Marsalek had likely been a Russian agent for nearly a decade.
Marsalek already stands accused of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from investors. Following multiple international investigations, officials from intelligence, police and judiciary agencies in several countries now say the 43-year-old native of Austria used his defunct payments company to illegally help Russian spy agencies move money to fund covert operations around the world. One of the most wanted men in the world, Marsalek has also provided assistance to the mercenary organization of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the late Russian warlord, and is now involved in the reconfiguration of his business empire in Africa on behalf of Russian officials from his new domicile in Dubai, according to Western intelligence.
Wirecard got its start processing payments for pornography websites on its way to becoming an Internet finance behemoth. During its heyday, the company claimed to process $140 billion of transactions a year on behalf of a quarter million businesses, making it a rival of Square and PayPal Holdings. It was briefly valued at more than any German bank.
Read more on livemint.com
