By Arne Meyer-Fünffinger and Josef Streule, BR At the end of March 2014, the mood between Wirecard and the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) was dazzling. Wirecard Bank AG, which belongs to the group, has just solved a problem for the BKA – in connection with an account that the bank set up on behalf of the authority. “I would like to thank you expressly and cordially, in particular ‘that’ and ‘how quickly’ you were able to implement the whole thing,” wrote an employee of the BKA department “Serious and Organized Crime” by email to the general manager at the time the Wirecard Bank.

Wirecard: “We will become the BKA house bank”

The latter forwards the BKA thank you email to a board of directors on the same day. In addition, he writes, “We have 2 more BKA accounts”. The board of directors replied immediately and with great satisfaction: “Great – thank you very much! We will become the BKA house bank.” The e-mails are part of an extensive data set of internal Wirecard documents, the BR research could see. It shows: The BKA has maintained a close cooperation with the now insolvent payment service provider for years.

The special investigator Wieland is sharply critical of the BKA’s actions. Image: picture alliance / dpa / dpa-Zentral The former Green Bundestag member and interior expert Wolfgang Wieland took a closer look at the cooperation in his function as investigative officer for the Wirecard investigative committee. In the previously unpublished paper that BR research is available, he comes to the conclusion, among other things, that the BKA must put up with the question of whether it should not have “as an authority to combat money laundering and organized crime should have examined its partners more critically”. Instead, the BKA “made the buck to the gardener,” writes Wieland.

Wirecard issued credit cards for the BKA

The Federal Criminal Police Office chose Wirecard Bank to use credit cards to monitor suspects. In February 2014, for example, a BKA official approached the management of Wirecard Bank with the following request: “We would like to give a target person an originally sealed mywirecard VISA as a ‘gift’ so that they can use the card diligently. […] As soon as the card on surveillance is used, a corresponding data record with the information is sent directly to the law enforcement agency. “Since the target person is very suspicious, this card must be handed over to her in its original packaging.

Trusted exchange for years

At the BKA, the trust in the company is apparently so great that the authority inaugurates Wirecard in search concepts. In January 2014 she sent a fax to those responsible at the bank. The BKA investigators want to explain the “E-Cash” search concept to Wirecard: “For this purpose, we have already agreed business processes with various headends and companies (…). From our point of view, it would be a good idea to discuss this matter with you (gladly at your house) to explain in more detail. ”

Good and uncomplicated cooperation

At the same time, Wirecard always tried to make the BKA’s work as easy and inexpensive as possible. The company reimbursed the authority for any account management fees or credit card usage fees that were normally incurred. A board member of Wirecard Bank is pleased that Wirecard managers were able to gain insight into account movements from undercover investigations. He wants to be informed about account balances, “then at least I can see what’s going on on the account,” he wrote in an email in June 2014. Danyal Bayaz, Member of the Bundestag for the Greens and member of the Wirecard investigation committee, is critical of the cooperation: “At a scandalous company like Wirecard, where a board member himself had contacts to Russia, Libya or former security officials from Austria, who knows what with this data happened, and of course that’s a huge problem. ”

Cooperation with the BKA as “image polish”

According to the report by investigative officer Wieland, the group’s cooperation with the BKA “came as it was called” – “in the image polishing away from porn and gaming financiers to serious partners in politics and in particular actors from the security sector”. The cooperation is apparently practical for the BKA. Shortly before Christmas 2015, the authority thanked Wirecard: “We look forward to continued good cooperation in 2016 too.” And it runs for years. According to Wieland’s assessment, in the area of ​​operational management alone, BKA confidants “in the period from 2014-2020 made about 33% of all operational credit card sales with Wirecard”. The business conduct of Wirecard has long been the subject of criticism, and since 2015 there have been investigations against Wirecard officials on the grounds of “suspicion of money laundering” or “aiding in unauthorized gambling”. For Thomas Feltes, long-time professor of criminology at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, it is incomprehensible that the BKA has cooperated with Wirecard for so long: “At the latest from a certain point in time when the BKA knew or could have known that Wirecard did not have everything If things are done right, you should have pulled the rip cord. ”

The federal government is keeping silent about the BKA cooperation

In retrospect, this close relationship between the BKA and Wirecard appears to be uncomfortable for the federal government. This is at least the impression made by the internal communication between the Chancellery and several ministries shortly after the Wirecard collapse in June 2020. At that time, the Green parliamentary group submitted a comprehensive catalog of questions to the federal government. In it, she wants to know, among other things, whether Wirecard AG or one of its subsidiaries “advised, supported or otherwise worked with the authorities”. The Federal Chancellery then asks the individual departments to deliver. The Federal Ministry of the Interior, as the BKA supervisory authority, reports to the Chancellery about the cooperation between the Federal Criminal Police Office and the Wirecard Bank. But the experts in the Chancellery come to the conclusion that “the mere use of bank accounts or credit cards” does not involve any cooperation with Wirecard “in the sense of the question”. And so the answer sent on August 10, 2020 is: “The Federal Government is not aware of any collaborations.” The Green politician Bayaz calls for a comprehensive clarification of this process: “If we know today that German security authorities have used credit cards via Wirecard, for example, the question naturally arises, have any possible security interests of the Federal Republic of Germany been violated? This is a highly explosive process. And now all the cards have to be on the table. ” Neither the Federal Criminal Police Office nor the Federal Ministry of the Interior wanted to comment on the incident. The Chancellery referred to the responsibility of the Federal Ministry of the Interior. The Wirecard investigation committee of the Bundestag will deal with the report of the investigative commissioner Wieland on Thursday.

By Marilina Görz y Moratalla, SWR, and Jan-Philipp Hein The counter-espionage of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution is said to have so far found no evidence that the fugitive former Wirecard board member Jan Marsalek was tied to Russian intelligence services. However, the search continues. That writes the special investigator of the Wirecard investigation committee, the former Berlin Justice Senator Wolfgang Wieland (Greens), in his investigation report, the SWR is present. At the end of November, the committee of inquiry commissioned Wieland to deal specifically with the contacts of the former DAX group with secret services. In his report, Wieland also mentions that Marsalek’s colleague on the board, Susanne Steidl, reported to the Munich public prosecutor that Marsalek had “requested and received a complete annual data set of Wirecard business partners to be forwarded to the BND”. The Wieland paper does not reveal what kind of data it was about. But: The BND excludes “verifiably” from ever having received it. For Wieland, therefore, the question arises who received it instead.

The special investigator Wieland does not feel adequately informed by the federal government. Image: picture alliance / dpa / dpa-Zentral A spokesman for Steidl says this SWR– Inquiry: “The BND was a customer like many others.” Therefore, the process from summer 2019 was not unusual. It was also anonymous data, such as can be bought from other service providers. To this day, Steidl does not know what Marsalek did with the data.

“Ignorance of the intelligence services”

Shortly after the collapse of the then DAX group in the early summer of last year – this is also shown by documents supporting the SWR are available – the Federal Chancellery and various security authorities began investigating Wirecard and the fleeting top manager Marsalek after inquiries from the press and parliament. Shortly after his disappearance, he was said to have had close relationships with Russian secret services. But neither the BND nor the Office for the Protection of the Constitution want Marsalek and Wirecard to be on their radar. “As a result, the ignorance of the intelligence services was confirmed by June 2020,” writes Wieland. The fact that Marsalek is repeatedly associated with Russia is due to the fact that he pursued a large number of projects and businesses there and traveled there very often. In 2017 and 2018 he also tried to start a project in Libya together with a professor of Arabic studies from Moscow, a high-ranking officer in the Austrian Armed Forces and a German refugee expert. In addition, his escape with a private jet via Belarusian Minsk is said to have finally led him to Russia itself. The secret service expert and historian Wolfgang Krieger from the Philipps University in Marburg says: “Jan Marsalek does not get protection from Russia for free. It is very likely that he received protection for financial espionage.”

Wirecard worked together with the BKA

Several units of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) worked together with the later scandal group, whose bankruptcy has grown into one of the largest criminal cases in German history. From 2013, online criminals were to be convicted with the help of the Group’s own Wirecard bank. The bank also made credit cards available for this purpose. Later, the BKA turned to the group “in order to obtain information about the whereabouts of known or unknown perpetrators in real time when developing new search approaches with the help of data from credit cards,” Wieland writes in his report. For Wieland, the fact that the report leaves many questions unanswered in spite of everything is also due to the lack of cooperation and willingness to provide information on the part of the federal government and the Bavarian state government. Information is blocked to this day due to ongoing criminal investigations. The Bavarian Ministry of Justice did not even send confirmations of receipt in response to inquiries. The SPD MP Jens Zimmermann from the Wirecard committee also criticizes this: “The fact that the Bavarian Ministry of Justice did not respond to the request for support from the investigative committee’s special investigator casts a bad but telling picture of the lack of willingness to provide information in Bavaria.”

Ex-top secret service agent in front of the committee

Wieland will present an expanded version of his report to the committee of inquiry on Thursday morning. Immediately afterwards, two former intelligence coordinators from the Chancellery have to testify before the committee. Klaus-Dieter Fritsche, who was responsible for the secret services at the government headquarters from 2014 to 2018, signed a consulting contract with Wirecard in 2019. Until 2020, Fritsche lobbied for the group at its old place of work. In 2019, a department head of the Chancellery met a Wirecard board member. According to Fritsche, Bernd Schmidbauer, who worked under Helmut Kohl in the Chancellery from 1991 to 1998, must testify. Schmidbauer admitted in February that he had met Marsalek about two years ago in his Munich property. In addition, Schmidbauer was in contact for years with one of Marsalek’s escape helpers, a former chief constitutional protection officer from Austria. The FDP chairman Florian Toncar has high hopes for the interrogations of the two ex-top secret service agents. The whole complex around Wirecard and the intelligence services has been “underexposed” so far, says Toncar. It is “worrying” that foreign intelligence services apparently got involved with Wirecard. Toncar calls the fact that the company was used as a “money laundering machine” for the interests of the Russian government or to pay mercenaries in Libya or Syria or to circumvent sanctions, “says Toncar,” hypotheses that the facts point to. ” Addition from April 14th, 2021: According to its own account, the Bavarian Ministry of Justice “transmitted” the information requested by the investigative officer Wieland. These were received by him today at noon. Confirmations of receipt, according to a spokeswoman, “are generally not sent by the Bavarian Ministry of Justice”. Therefore, the allegations made against the Bavarian government are incorrect.