Five years after German bank Wirecard collapsed, the man accused of leaving a €1.9 billion hole in its balance sheet is now living as a Russian intelligence officer – or asset – in Moscow.
Viennese-born Jan Marsalek, Wirecard’s chief operating officer and one of Europe’s most wanted men, is now living out of reach of western investigators in the Russian capital under an assumed identity: 47-year-old Riga-born Alexander Michaelowitsch Nelidov, according to investigations by three publishers.
Since his spectacular disappearance in 2020, speculation had grown that the 45-year-old had long been working for the Russian security services.
Last year, an investigative team lead by Austria’s Der Standard and Germany’s Der Spiegel claimed Marsalek escaped to Russia in the summer of 2020 with the help of an erotic actress turned spy and was living a new life under an identity borrowed from an Orthodox priest.
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Now the same investigative team, working with online investigative platform The Insider, have turned up security camera images and other details of his new life in Russia.
The team say disgruntled Russian officials provided them with information and images of Marsalek in suits and more informal clothes, with a full beard and a replenished hairline.
Mobile phone data collected by the investigator team suggest Marsalek works at the FSB security service’s Moscow headquarters, travelling there almost daily by metro.
[ Wirecard fraud started in 2010, former executive saysOpens in new window ]
“Marsalek feels safe and well in Russia because he knows he stands under the protection of the security services there,” said Roman Lehberger of Der Spiegel, one of the organisations involved in the investigation. “He wants to make himself useful and show what he can do as an agent of the Kremlin.”
A call to Marsalek’s current mobile phone went unanswered, the investigative team say, but a text message, after a pause, resulted in a reply suggesting it was a wrong number.
Marsalek’s new life marks a change from his previous existence working for Wirecard, which he joined as a coder and helped transform from an online processor of porn and gambling payments into a major online payments agent.
Wirecard hoped to become Europe’s PayPal but was revealed by the Financial Times as a giant Ponzi scheme, moving money around to inflate the company’s value on paper. As the bank began to collapse in 2020, Wirecard’s chief executive Marcus Braun was arrested and is still on trial for fraud, while Marsalek, who disappeared that June, remains on the run.
German prosecutors and Braun’s defence allege that Marsalek siphoned off billions from Germany’s largest listed financial services company, but disagree over whether he acted alone.
A European-wide investigation revealed that Marsalek sought contact with Russia’s security services around 2010 as Wirecard sought contracts in Russia.
“He continues to work for domestic intelligence perhaps in an even more intensive way,” said Roman Dobrokhotov, a Russian investigative journalist and founder of The Insider.
In December last year, Marsalek was revealed as the ringleader of a UK-based network of Russian spies convicted in the British High Court of plotting to kidnap and assassinate dissidents and investigative journalists, including two of the investigative journalists after him.
“Like many blown Russian assets no longer able to operate in the West, Marsalek lives a fairly mundane and unglamorous life in the Motherland,” noted The Insider, “albeit one punctuated by occasional flashes of adventure. Marsalek takes regular 27-hour-long trips to Russian-occupied Crimea.”
