The Executive Who Disappeared with 2.7 Trillion Won Was a Spy

Germany's Largest Market Cap Company Wirecard COO
Flees by Private Plane Immediately After Incident

Jan Marsalek, the former Chief Operating Officer (COO) who disappeared along with Wirecard's internal cash reserves of 1.9 billion euros (approximately 2.7 trillion KRW), was revealed to have been a spy for Russian intelligence agencies. Wirecard is the largest electronic payment company in Europe, based in Germany.

On the 15th (local time), The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported this news citing Western intelligence officials.

Wirecard headquarters.
Photo by Yonhap News

Marsalek was born in 1980 in Austria as a third-generation Czech immigrant. He dropped out of high school and taught himself computer programming, founding a software company at the age of 19 in 1999.

He later joined Wirecard, a startup payment company targeting internet pornography and gambling sites, and helped grow it to the point where it was listed on the German stock market.

At one point, Wirecard's annual transaction volume exceeded 140 billion dollars (approximately 182 trillion KRW), making it a competitor to the American electronic payment company PayPal.

When Marsalek lived in a luxury rental home in Munich, Germany, paying 35,000 euros (about 50 million KRW) per month, he often mentioned to colleagues his connections with international spy organizations, but his colleagues dismissed these remarks as jokes.

Intelligence agencies from various countries believe that Marsalek secretly worked for Russian intelligence agencies while serving as an executive at Wirecard.

Marsalek reportedly passed various information, including Wirecard's remittance records, to Russia through German intelligence agencies, and played a role in the fund transfer process of the Russian mercenary company Wagner Group.

He is also known to have assisted the Russian military intelligence agency GRU and the Foreign Intelligence Service SVR in sending funds to Russian agents and collaborators operating in countries across the Middle East and Africa.

The British prosecution confirmed that Marsalek worked for Russian intelligence agencies for nearly ten years, managing five spy networks operated by Russian intelligence in the UK.

Marsalek's double life came to an end after the media raised suspicions of accounting fraud at Wirecard in June 2020, and a special audit confirmed that the company's internal cash reserves of 1.9 billion euros had indeed disappeared.

Immediately after the incident, Marsalek fled to Belarus by private plane. He later moved to Moscow, where he reportedly obtained Russian citizenship and a new identity.

Marsalek is currently accused of embezzling funds from external investors amounting to at least hundreds of millions of dollars.

Wirecard has gone bankrupt, and former CEO Markus Braun has been arrested and is on trial for accounting fraud. He maintains his innocence regarding the missing 1.9 billion euros.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.