What was in it for Russia?
The missing 1.9 billions would be an interesting asset for e.g. NK secret services, but for Russia it's a drop in a bucket.
The missing 1.9 billions would be an interesting asset for e.g. NK secret services, but for Russia it's a drop in a bucket.
The fraud at Wirecard started before Marsalek seems to have been recruited as a Russian asset; the GRU probably didn’t even know it was happening until fairly late in the game. As frauds tend to do, it snowballed, until you’re setting up a Potemkin bank branch in the Philippines to get your auditor off your back about the couple billion Euros in cash you claim to have.
Still, I can think of a few reasons why an intelligence service might want to be connected to the wealthy COO of a company that processes payments for porn websites and offshore casinos…
"British prosecutors say that from 2020 to 2023, Marsalek ran a ring of five U.K. based Bulgarians who are alleged to have spied for Russia, directing them to gather information on people with the aim of helping the Kremlin abduct them. Officials say Marsalek was used by Russian intelligence services as a middleman to put distance between them and the spy network as it targeted individuals across Europe."
...
"While running Wirecard, Marsalek helped the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, and the SVR, its main overseas spying organization, pay intelligence officers and informants and funnel money into conflict zones in the Middle East and Africa, according to the officials.
At the same time, these Western officials suspect Marsalek was gathering information on other customers of Munich-based Wirecard, most notably Germany’s main BND intelligence agency and the Federal Criminal Office, the country’s equivalent of the FBI, and handing it over to Moscow."
...
"Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, as well as the country’s equivalent of the FBI, the BKA, told parliament during a public inquiry that ran from September 2020 to June 2021 that they had used Wirecard credit cards and bank accounts for their agents abroad as well as for paying informants at home and abroad. Senior German intelligence officials confirmed this to The Wall Street Journal. "
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"Marsalek ordered Wirecard Bank employees to breach data-protection and other rules to compile data about clients, according to testimony by former executives to German prosecutors. Several intelligence officials said it could have provided information about intelligence agents’ work. Wirecard’s former chief product officer, Susane Steidl, said Marsalek had overruled objections to collecting customer data and told her in 2019 he needed the data for the BND—something the agency categorically denies."
One can only wonder what SBU was doing in the meantime...