Jan Marsalek, the former Wirecard chief operating officer who is considered one of the maestros of the multibillion-euro accounting scandal that obliterated the German payments company, is on the lamb lam. He might be in the Philippines. He might be in Russia. He might be in Belarus. But no one knows exactly where the dude is.
However, he did show up on Interpol’s red notice (most wanted) list:
Under “Charges,” the Interpol red notice states:
Violation of the german duty on securities act and the securities trading act, criminal breach of trust, especially serious case of fraud.
Prosecutors suspect Marsalek played a key role in inflating Wirecard’s results by booking fake income for years, according to the Wall Street Journal:
The German payments group, which was briefly worth more than the country’s largest bank, filed for insolvency in late June after disclosing that more than $2 billion of its cash supposedly held in trustee-managed bank accounts was probably fake.
German prosecutors suspect Mr. Marsalek, longtime Chief Executive Markus Braun and others colluded to inflate the company’s results by booking fake income since at least 2015, which allowed Wirecard to raise €3.2 billion ($3.8 billion) in loans prosecutors believe are now likely lost.
But while Mr. Braun and three others have been arrested since, Mr. Marsalek has eluded authorities since the company’s collapse in June.
It’s only a matter of time before his hands are cuffed.
Hunt for Ex-Wirecard Executive Jan Marsalek Goes Public in Germany [Wall Street Journal]
