Germany does not want to meet fugitive Wirecard employee Marsalek
Intelligence feared the approach last year by a middleman with suspected links to Russia's FSB intelligence agency was a trap

Germany's foreign intelligence service turned down an offer to meet former Wirecard manager Jan Marsalek in Moscow last year, fearing the invitation to meet the fugitive was a trap by the Russian FSB secret service, which was familiar with the matter people explained.
German prosecutors are accusing Marsalek, Wirecard's former deputy, of being one of the main perpetrators of the €3.2 billion scam that shocked the country's political and financial establishment.
The digital payments company, long heralded as one of Germany's few success stories in the tech sector, collapsed into bankruptcy in June 2020, shortly after announcing that half of its revenues and €1.9 billion in company funds didn't exist .
Marsalek's meeting with the German BND was proposed by a businessman in March 2021, according to people familiar with the matter. However, the idea was opposed by senior BND officials in Berlin, who believed the businessman could be an informal FSB collaborator.
Marsalek, who was a close confidant of CEO Markus Braun and responsible for the fraudulent business, went into hiding shortly before the Munich public prosecutor's office issued an arrest warrant against him in June 2020. Austrian police found that in June 2020, Marsalek boarded a private jet at a small airport south of Vienna and flew to the Belarusian capital of Minsk, where track of the Austrian national was lost.
Braun, who is in police custody in Augsburg, was charged last month with fraud, breach of trust, account manipulation and market manipulation.
Both the German public prosecutor's office and the BND are now certain that the 42-year-old Marsalek is hiding in Moscow, as reported by people familiar with their deliberations.
Marsalek has been of interest to three Western intelligence agencies that have probed his links to individuals or networks linked to Russia's GRU military intelligence agency, was reported in 2020.
German prosecutors, who put him on Interpol's Most Wanted List, filed a request for Marsalek's extradition to Russian law enforcement agencies in 2020. They replied that they had no address for Marsalek and no evidence of his entry into the country.
In March 2021, during the parliamentary investigation into the scandal in Germany, the Russian Foreign Ministry tweeted that it was "confused by the claims about Wirecard chief executive Jan Marsalek's close ties to Russian security services" and called on Berlin to "allow the politicization of this matter break up".
Around the same time, however, the BND representative at the German embassy in Moscow was approached by a businessman who suggested meeting Marsalek, according to people familiar with the matter. Although the businessman held no formal position with Russian intelligence, the German BND viewed him as an informal collaborator with the FSB, according to people familiar with the matter.
Fearing that Russian intelligence might try to set a trap to embarrass German intelligence operatives, the meeting was rejected by senior BND officials in Berlin, according to one of the people, adding that Angela Merkel's chancellorship then discussed the matter was informed. The information was not passed on to the Munich prosecutor's office, the person added.
"You have to keep in mind that this is the same secret service that poisoned [Alexej] Navalny," another person familiar with BND decision-making told.
After the Bild newspaper reported this week on the offer to meet Marsalek in Moscow, Munich prosecutors met with BND officials in Berlin and were briefed on the matter.
The picture report said that the federal government knew the exact whereabouts of Marsalek in Moscow. BND boss Bruno Kahl was vague when answering questions from MPs about Marsalek's whereabouts during the parliamentary investigation into Wirecard.
However, a person familiar with the matter denied this detail of the Bild report, adding that the BND only had "an assumption" about Marsalek's exact address.
"The new revelations raise serious questions as to whether the parliamentary investigative committee [by the BND] was misled," said Jens Zimmermann, MP for the Social Democrats and former member of the Unte





