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Wirecard fugitive Jan Marsalek was recruited by Russian intelligence at a meeting on a yacht in July 2014, sparking a decade-long association with the country’s security services, according to new reports.
An investigation by The Insider, Spiegel, ZDF and the Austrian Standard found that Marsalek’s entanglement with the GRU, Russia’s notorious military intelligence service, long predated Wirecard’s June 2020 collapse.
Marsalek was the group’s chief operating officer, responsible for the elaborate arrangements with business partners used to fabricate the sales and profits that made Wirecard Germany’s most valuable fintech before it was exposed as a fraud.
Among new details of his long-standing double life is that Marsalek subsequently took shelter in Moscow having adopted the identity of an orthodox priest.
According to the investigation, Marsalek’s early infatuation with Russia came in the form of a relationship with a Russian erotic actress connected to the country’s security services with whom he partied, travelled and took joyrides in MiG fighter jets.
At her 30th birthday party aboard a luxury cruiser in Nice, she introduced Marsalek to Stanislav Petlinsky, a Russian former special forces operative known as “Stas”. Spiegel reports he then told others he handed the enthusiastic Austrian over to the GRU to manage.
Petlinsky remained a close associate of the Wirecard executive for several years, part of a crowd of Libyan and Austrian spies involved in Marsalek’s schemes who congregated at a villa opposite the Russian consulate in Munich.
The Financial Times has previously reported that Marsalek used the villa to pitch a plan to use a humanitarian mission in Libya as cover to develop a militia force that could control the flow of migrants from north Africa towards Europe. A former colonel in the GRU was to act as a consultant in the venture.
Marsalek had obtained interests in Libyan cement plants, which became a local base of operations for the RSB mercenary group under a contract for mine clearing. According to the new investigation, Marsalek’s aspirations to control a militia force were more than aspirational: he secretly purchased the RSB organisation via shell companies, using cash delivered by private jet.
While the extent of Marsalek’s spying activities remains unknown, he used contacts in Austrian intelligence to investigate people likely to be of interest to the Russian state, while Wirecard also provided some payment services to German security services.
In 2017 Marsalek is said to have met a senior member of the Wagner mercenary group in Munich, before they flew to Syria for a sightseeing tour of Palmyra with Petlinsky, who said the Austrian guest was shown the correct technique for firing a rocket-propelled grenade towards positions held by Isis.
Certain relatives of Petlinsky are also said to have assisted Marsalek in attempts to protect Wirecard from scrutiny by the FT, whose reporting over several years exposed the group’s accounting fraud. According to The Insider, one relative oversaw a group of hackers targeting reporters, using the email address FTraid@gmail.com.
Wirecard collapsed into insolvency in June 2020 after it was forced to admit that €1.9bn in cash linked to its Asian operations did not exist, and Petlinsky is said to have orchestrated Marsalek’s subsequent escape.
The investigation said Marsalek flew from Vienna to Belarus, where he travelled into Russia and on to occupied Crimea, before the trail went cold.
According to British authorities, Marsalek continued to be useful. He is alleged to have directed the activities of six Bulgarian nationals resident in the UK who have been charged with spying for Russia.
This article has been updated to remove an incorrect reference to the Russian embassy