In the Wirecard lawsuit, employees of the two major credit card companies Visa and Mastercard support the central charge that there were fake transactions at the Dax group, which collapsed in 2020. The three witnesses – two from Visa, one from Mastercard – gave unanimous testimony in court in Munich on Wednesday.
According to this, during checks they could not find any evidence that credit card purchases documented by Wirecard had actually been made. “I referred to the card number and the amount, and that did not yield any results,” said the Mastercard employee on the 26th of the 100 days of the process scheduled so far.
The 56-year-old analyzed payments made with 61 Mastercard credit cards in late 2019 and early 2020, according to Wirecard. Accordingly, the cards in question existed, but not the payments. The checks were the result of questions from the Munich public prosecutor’s office.
No payments sign
Two Visa executives also reported finding no trace of the payments mentioned by Wirecard. “There were no results,” said a witness who traveled specially from Britain. His German colleague had researched 35,000 Wirecard-recorded payments that went through 147 Visa cards. He found the card numbers, “but not the transactions”.
Wirecard and the Group’s business partners in Asia processed credit card purchases as payment service providers at the interface between merchants and banks. Since the summer of 2020, Wirecard has lost 1.9 billion euros. The trust funds would come from credit card payments processed by these partner companies.
Ex-boss denies allegations
The testimonies of the three witnesses are important because the trial is one of the defendants against the defendants: Former CEO Markus Braun denies the allegation of bogus transactions. Instead, the Austrian accuses co-defendant former Wirecard executive and star witness Oliver Bellenhaus of embezzling money from real transactions with his accomplices.
Accordingly, Braun asked the two witnesses to what extent they had checked the credit card numbers. The goal is that the real perpetrators may have concealed real payments with fake credit card numbers to divert money and cover their own tracks.
In what is considered the biggest fraud case in Germany since 1945, Braun, Bellenhaus and the group’s former chief accountant have been on trial since early December. According to the indictment, they allegedly invented most of Wirecard’s profits and defrauded loan banks out of 3.1 billion euros since 2015. All in all, the major court case in Munich involves an immense number of credit card statements. (oee/sda/awp/dpa)
Soource :Watson
I am Amelia James, a passionate journalist with a deep-rooted interest in current affairs. I have more than five years of experience in the media industry, working both as an author and editor for 24 Instant News. My main focus lies in international news, particularly regional conflicts and political issues around the world.
