Wirecard - House of Cards

Part of the portfolio since June 2020

A lot has been written and said about Wirecard. The former German Wunderkind had always been suspicious, and the only question we have to ask is: why didn't the Kapitalmarkthygienemuseum get its hands on a piece of Wirecard earlier?

Well, call it “thumb sucking”…

Our personal history with Wirecard goes back more than ten years, and as investors we always stayed far away, as a lot of things smelled quite “fishy”. It was an open secret that the accounts were difficult to read and that there was a lot of smoke and mirrors around. I recommend a blog post by a blogger who had his beef with Wirecard for a good ten years.

When the FT reported on suspicious transactions in Singapore in early 2019, the regulator BaFin's answer was to ban short selling of the shares.

Only when the (in)famous KPMG special audit came out at the end of April 2020 – unable to clear the allegations for lack of documents – did it become obvious that time was running out fast. We started poring over eBay and found these nice coffee cups. We still made close to 100 % on this emotional short. It took only a couple of weeks, and the whole thing blew up spectacularly.

How spectacularly? Absurdly spectacularly. On 18 June 2020 Wirecard announced that €1.9bn of cash, supposedly sitting with banks in the Philippines, could not be found. CEO Markus Braun resigned the next day and was arrested on 22 June; on 25 June Wirecard filed for insolvency – the first DAX member ever to do so.

You only know how bad things are when your former COO is bragging about “having the formula for Novichok” (a military nerve agent) and is able to fake his entry into the Philippines while (in truth) travelling, most likely, to Russia.

Well, I think Jan Marsalek is the first one to have a mug shot on a wanted poster for “fraud in the billions”, wanted by the German authorities. (The Kapitalmarkthygienemuseum is, of course, looking to get its hands on an original wanted poster.) The story has since outgrown the business pages: in March 2025 a London jury convicted members of a Bulgarian spy ring that prosecutors said had been run for Russian intelligence by Marsalek. He is still at large, believed to be in Russia.

Markus Braun, in custody since 2020, has been on trial in Munich since December 2022 and denies the allegations. After more than 280 hearing days, the court is aiming for closing arguments in November 2026; the verdict is still pending.

Museum note: Wirecard promised cashless payments – and delivered them. The cash was simply less than promised.

Some assorted links to articles about Wirecard:

09/2020: Prosecutors examine a €50m loan between Markus Braun and Jan Marsalek (Handelsblatt)

09/2020: FT long read: “Wirecard and Me”

Further reading

• FT – Dan McCrum: Wirecard and Me (2020)
• Dan McCrum – Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth (book) (2022)
• Wikipedia – Wirecard scandal
• Value and Opportunity – Wirecard, the German Enron: a very personal history 2008–2020 (2020)
• Bellingcat – World's most wanted man Jan Marsalek located in Belarus (2020)
• Al Jazeera – Three Bulgarians found guilty of spying for Russia from UK base (2025)
• Legal Tribune Online – Keine Aussetzung im Wirecard-Prozess (2026)