Wirecard Trial: Defendant Wants Prosecutor to Witness

In court, prosecutors usually act as prosecutors. The defenders in the Wirecard trial in Munich want to turn the tables and put the investigators on the defensive.

The defense of the accused ex-CEO Markus Braun wants a prosecutor to be heard as a witness. Braun’s defender Alfred Dierlamm asked for this on Wednesday. The lawyers want to substantiate their accusation that the investigative authority conducted a unilateral and careless investigation at Braun’s expense.

Dierlamm accused the prosecutor of having promised benefits to co-suspect witness Oliver Bellenhaus at the beginning of the investigation in July 2020 – in exchange for allegations against Braun and two other Wirecard top executives.

The Public Prosecution Service Bellenhaus would therefore have drawn attention to the role of the key witness in the Siemens corruption procedure in a preliminary interview that is not recorded in the files. “It was expressly stated that this star witness got away with a two-year suspended sentence,” Dierlamm said.

Prosecutors deny allegations

The prosecutor allegedly told Bellenhaus expressly that his testimony was to “incriminate other people”, including Brauns. A prosecutor who was involved at the time must now testify as a witness in court. In the past, the prosecution has always rejected the allegations made by Braun’s lawyers.

The judges then questioned for the first time a former Wirecard employee who was not suspected as a witness. After Wirecard’s insolvency, the attorney was involved in internal investigations into the accused’s fake transactions with partner companies dubbed “TPA” until 2021.

These should process credit card payments in the Middle East and Southeast Asia on behalf of Wirecard. According to the prosecutor and star witness Bellenhaus, the TPA sales were fictitious, but according to Braun real. The former CEO and his lawyers argue that the public prosecutor’s office should have overlooked or failed to check payment flows of around two billion euros in their investigation.

However, the 41-year-old witness reported that Wirecard’s internal investigation had not revealed any evidence for the existence of the TPA business. Accordingly, she and colleagues searched the group’s entire electronic mailboxes. “We found no communication that a dealer was referred to a TPA through us.” However, the lawyer found no evidence in the emails she studied that ex-CEO Braun was involved in the third-party affairs. (aeg/sda/awp/dpa)