The Wirecard trial in Munich has its first highlight today. After hearing the testimony of state witness Oliver Bellenhaus in recent weeks, it was the turn of former CEO Markus Braun today. His questioning will probably take many days. Braun goes back a long way to his childhood, describes his penchant for numbers, and explains that Wirecard was created in 2005 through a reverse IPO where he was CEO, and Payabl (Compliance Rating) founder Ruediger Trautmann was Chief Sales Officer.
Alongside Markus Braun and Ruediger Trautmann, Burkhard Ley was the third member of the Board of Management as Chief Financial Officer. This was the beginning of an incredible international expansion of the German high-risk payment processor Wirecard.
While Oliver Bellenhaus denied in his statements that the so-called Third-Party Acquiring (TPA) network existed, Braun insisted it did. Bellenhaus had already been called a notorious liar by the defense attorneys of co-defendants Braun and Stephan von Erffa.
Later, Braun recounts that he was not involved in the malversations surrounding the TPA or the special audit by KMPG. He would only have been responsible for strategy and the big things. The importance of this special audit would have been too small to get his attention. That would have been handled exclusively by former (and currently fugitive) board member Jan Marsalek. Braun seems very credible in his statements, say the trial observers present.
Stay tuned; we will bring a detailed analysis of the Braun statements.