Wirecard execs allegedly looted $1 billion before collapse
Germany’s fallen financial services giant Wirecard was looted by top executives before its eventual collapse in June, a new report has revealed. The report claims that the executives funneled over $1 billion to suspicious partner companies in Asia.
Wirecard filed for insolvency in June in one of the biggest
accounting scandals in Europe. However, according to a report by the Financial
Times, the company’s financial woes started months earlier, with its executives
allegedly leading the looting.
The report claims that top ranking executives at the
Munich-based company began funneling tens of millions of euros to suspicious
companies in Asia. They embezzled from Wirecard under the guise of unsecured
loans to these Asian firms. In their financial reports, they claimed that the
loans were for advance payments to Asian merchants who were processing card
transactions for Wirecard.
The looting accelerated in the months leading to the
collapse, FT claims, citing sources with insider knowledge about the firm. In
the first three months of this year, over $182 million was paid out to these
‘partner’ companies.
The biggest recipient of the embezzled funds was Ocap, a
Singaporean company run by a former Wirecard executive. In Q1 this year, Ocap
received $117 million, for a total of $270 million in debt owed to Wirecard.
Other beneficiaries were Ruprecht, yet another Singaporean
company which received $47 million from Wirecard. Ruprecht suspended its
operations last week, just one month after the collapse of Wirecard. The others
were PayEasy in Manila, Dubai’s Al Alam and Singapore’s Senjo.
This additional lending to these firms pushed Wirecard’s
loans to business partners to €870 million ($1 billion) by March this year, FT
revealed.
The suspicious lending to the third party companies was
overseen by Jan Marsalek, Wirecard’s former chief operating officer. As
CoinGeek reported in July, Marsalek is on the run and is believed to be Russia.
Christopher Bauer, yet another highly-implicated former
Wirecard executive, died on August 9 in Manila under suspicious circumstances.
Bauer was formally in-charge of Asia, the region where the looting took place.
He then went on to run PayEasy in Manila, one of the companies that received
the unsecured loans. As per a Bloomberg report, he allegedly died of blood
poisoning.
Wirecard is the first member of Germany’s DAX index—which
comprises of the 30 largest companies in Germany—to file for insolvency. Its
failure has inflicted great reputational damage on Germany’s stock market, and
especially on the regulator, BaFin.
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