Wirecard star witness: I have 4.8 million

According to the prosecution witness, his participation in the alleged billion-euro Wirecard fraud raised 4.8 million euros. The manager Oliver Bellenhaus, who worked in Dubai from 2013 to 2020, received this amount as a one-time payment, diverted from company funds and bypassed payroll. Bellenhaus estimated his original monthly salary on Thursday in the Wirecard criminal case at 13,000 euros.

“The salary I received from Wirecard was far from appropriate for my position,” Bellenhaus said Thursday before the fourth criminal chamber of the Munich I regional court. The manager, who had been in detention for more than two and a half years, was in custody until the collapse of the scandalous group in the summer of 2020 Managing Director of the subsidiary Cardsystems Middle East in Dubai.

According to Bellenhaus, he asked for a salary increase, he had in mind an annual salary of 900,000 to 950,000 euros. Sales director Jan Marsalek rejected this – proposing instead a “one-off special payment” of 4.8 million euros. Bellenhaus invested the money in a foundation in Liechtenstein.

Hundreds of millions diverted?

Former CEO Markus Braun’s lawyers have accused Bellenhaus of diverting hundreds of millions of dollars from the group. Bellenhaus has rejected this several times. Nor did he own any Wirecard stock: “That would have been a bad investment.”

In his own words, he gradually slipped into the fraud over the years, but didn’t want to break free or face the prosecutor: “When I went in somewhere, I never went out backwards and cried.”

Huge pig deals

At Wirecard, a large part of the sham transactions with fabricated payment services went through Dubai. Over the years, according to Bellenhaus, the effort required to invent sham sales became so great that real business was hardly possible: “There was no more time to deal with customers.”

Bellenhaus has been on trial since December along with former CEO Markus Braun and the former chief accountant. According to the indictment, they have been falsifying the balance sheets of the payment service provider since 2015 and defrauding lending banks of 3.1 billion euros. (aeg/sda/awp/dpa)