From payments to armaments: the double life of Wirecard’s Jan Marsalek

From payments to armaments: the double life of Wirecard’s Jan Marsalek

It was early 2018 when Jan Marsalek, the young chief operating officer of German fintech champion Wirecard, held a meeting in his palatial home in Munich to talk about a new special project he was interested in: recruiting 15,000 Libyan militiamen. 

Mr Marsalek has now vanished in the wake of Wirecard's implosion. An international warrant has been issued for his arrest. German prosecutors regard him as one of the key suspects in a vast fraud that for years inflated the payment company's balance sheet and profits and helped propel it into the prestigious Dax 30 index.

But as documents and testimony from first-hand witnesses reveal, Mr Marsalek's interests went far beyond unorthodox accounting.

The 40-year-old Austrian has led multiple lives, with complicated and overlapping commercial and political interests. Sometimes those interests cleaved to Wirecard's aggressive expansion plans in frontier markets. Sometimes they coincided with Mr Marsalek's own sprawling and unusual range of personal investments. And sometimes they seemed to fit neatly with the work of Russia's intelligence agencies. 

Mr Marsalek is now a person of interest to three western intelligence agencies, according to officials in three countries.

In particular, they are intrigued by Mr Marsalek's association with individuals or networks linked to Russia's military