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Disgraced payments provider issued credit cards used by officers during criminal investigations
Germany’s top police agency co-operated closely over several years with Wirecard until late 2020, showing the extent to which the disgraced payments provider was intertwined with the country’s law enforcement establishment.
Wirecard, once a high-flying start-up seen as one of Germany’s rare technology success stories, crashed into insolvency last summer after it was revealed that €1.9bn of corporate cash did not exist. The scandal, which is one of Germany’s biggest postwar accounting frauds, continues to reverberate as it is probed by a parliamentary inquiry in Berlin.
Wirecard’s former chief operating officer Jan Marsalek, who according to people familiar with the matter had ties to the secret services in Austria and Russia, fled Germany last summer and is on Interpol’s most wanted list.
A special investigator, who was appointed by parliament to examine Wirecard’s links to law enforcement authorities, has established that from 2013 the Munich-based payments group had close ties to Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), whose operatives used Wirecard credit cards during criminal investigations.
Email correspondence between Wirecard and the BKA, seen by the Financial Times, suggests that the company issued at least some of the credit cards under fake identities that were then used by police officers to pay bills during criminal investigations. Wirecard waived its usual fee and provided the cards free of charge.
The special investigator concluded that about a third of all credit cards used by BKA officers in criminal investigations during this period were issued by Wirecard.
“We will become the BKA’s house bank at one point,” Wirecard executive Alexander von Knoop wrote in 2014 in an email to colleagues seen by the FT. There is no suggestion that he was personally involved in the issuance of the fake-ID credit cards.
“In hindsight, the BKA units — surely unwittingly — put the fox in charge of the henhouse,” the special investigator’s report, which was seen by the FT, concluded. Wolfgang Wieland, the special investigator, noted that the BKA was in charge of fighting money laundering and organised crime and should have scrutinised “its partners more critically”.
Wieland observed that Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, also used credit cards issued by Wirecard, though to a much lesser extent than the BKA.
Wirecard had been the subject of repeated allegations of money laundering and balance sheet manipulation since at least 2015. Munich prosecutors now accuse former senior executives at the company of having run a criminal enterprise that embezzled billions.
Wieland noted that Wirecard “acted properly” when it was working with the BKA and that there was no evidence that the company abused the payments data generated. However, the special investigator noted that the collaboration helped the company to improve its image as it sought to reposition itself as a reputable partner for government agencies.
Fabio De Masi, an MP for the leftwing Die Linke party, said that the BKA’s ties to Wirecard were “embarrassing and absurd”, arguing that they had put Germany’s national security interests “at risk”.
The BKA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The special investigator declined to comment.