How Wirecard Faked $2 Billion and Vanished to Russia

In 2020, Wirecard became the first company in Germany's DAX blue-chip index to file for insolvency. 1.9 billion euros of cash on its balance sheet had never existed. Its chief operating officer, Jan Marsalek, boarded a private jet from a small Austrian airfield and vanished to Minsk. Six years later he is reportedly walking into the headquarters of Russia's federal security service on most working days, directing a spy ring that has now been sentenced at the Old Bailey. And Markus Braun, the CEO who sat across from him for eighteen years, is still in a Munich cell insisting he had no idea. This film asks a smaller question than the one on trial in Germany. Not whether Markus Braun was lying. Whether he should have known his business partner had been meeting a Russian military intelligence handler since 2014, running half the company from a Munich villa opposite the Russian consulate, and using Wirecard's payment infrastructure to track the journalists investigating Russia. Inside: the reverse merger that skipped a prospectus, the banking licence that made the accounts unreadable, the short sellers Germany prosecuted instead of the company, the Financial Times investigation by Dan McCrum, the KPMG special audit that could not confirm most of the profit, the phone call to a Filipino bank that ended everything, and the psychology of eleven years spent not looking. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 📩 Power & Ruin Collapse Playbook Investigating 200+ Companies with Bonus Theranos Case File : → news.powerandruin.com/subscribe ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ About Power & Ruin Power & Ruin investigates the psychology behind companies, movements, and belief systems that reshaped the world, and why their collapse was inevitable. Cinematic deep-dives into fraud, corporate failure, and the psychology of power. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ CHAPTERS 0:00 The CEO Who Says He Didn't Know 1:05 How Wirecard Skipped Its Own IPO 3:43 The Banking Licence That Made the Accounts Unreadable 5:00 Jan Marsalek Takes Asia 6:53 The Short Sellers Germany Prosecuted 9:05 BaFin Bans Short Selling of a Single Stock 10:35 The KPMG Audit That Couldn't Verify Half the Profit 13:18 EY Calls the Bank in the Philippines 14:40 Marsalek's Flees 16:15 Marsalek's Russian Intelligence Handler 18:20 Should He Have Known? 20:24 The Psychology of Fear in Fraud