The Journal. - 'The Ultimate Confidence Trickster': The Double Life of a Tech Exec

Episode Date: January 2, 2024

For more than three years, Jan Marsalek has been on the run. He was the jet-setting COO of Wirecard, the German company that imploded after a financial fraud scandal. But now, Western intelligence and security officials are saying Marsalek had likely been a Russian spy for nearly a decade. WSJ's Bojan Pancevski tells the tale of the investigations into Marsalek's covert operations. Further Listening: - Wirecard's Missing $2 Billion  Further Reading: - He’s Wanted for Wirecard’s Missing $2 Billion. He’s Now Suspected of Being a Russian Spy. - U.K. Says Wirecard’s Marsalek Worked With Five Suspected Russian Spies  - How Wirecard Went From Tech Star to Bankrupt  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It was the summer of 2020, and a man named Jan Marcelek needed to disappear. The company that Marcelek helped lead was crashing down. Billions of dollars had disappeared, and authorities were alleging a financial conspiracy. It was a Ponzi scheme, it was a fraud, and in the end it collapsed because it was missing almost $2 billion from its balance sheet. Law enforcement was closing in.

And so, under cover of night, Marseilleck fled. Hours before an arrest warrant was issued, Marseilleck boarded a private jet from a small Austrian provincial airport, and this airplane took him to Minsk. From Minsk, the capital of Belarus, Marseilleck moved again.

He was picked up in a car by the Internal Secret Service of Russia, the capital of Belarus, Marseilleck moved again. He was picked up in a car by the Internal Secret Service of Russia, the FSB, and he was kind of chauffeured all the way to Moscow. Why Moscow? That's because intelligence agencies now say that Marseilleck was not just involved

in financial fraud. He was also a Russian spy. Since Marseilleck fled more than three years ago, authorities have been hunting him down. Our colleague Boyan Panchevsky has been following Marseilleck's story. It's a rather extraordinary story about the biggest financial frauds

in recent European history. It's a story about one of the most wanted men in the world. And it's a story about Russian espionage involved in all of these things. A lot of very fascinating elements there. Absolutely. It's like a Netflix series, really, or a James Bond movie. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza.

It's Tuesday, January 2nd. Coming up on the show, the alleged double life of tech executive Jan Marcelec. Seth and Riley's Garage Hard Lemonade. A delicious classic with a vibrant taste of fresh lemons. The perfect balance of sweet and sour with a crisp, sesty edge. Welcome to The Garage, the place of refreshing hard lemonade. Available at the LCBO. Must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Jan Marcelec was born in 1980 in a town outside Vienna, Austria.

Marcelec was born in 1980 in a town outside Vienna, Austria. His father had Czech roots. His mother is a doctor, I believe. The parents got divorced when he was a teenager. He had a kind of a normal upbringing, relatively modest, sort of lower middle class, perhaps. What we know is that he dropped out of high school, so he's only kind of finished elementary education, which makes it even more extraordinary the kind of the level of achievement he's had in the corporate world. After leaving school, Marseilleck taught himself computer programming. At 19, he set up a business that sold software.

And then in 2000, Marseilleck joined the company that would make him millions, a German payment processor called Wirecard. He joined Wirecard, which was a kind of a fresh startup at the time, kind of small scale, obscure company that was mainly handling payments for internet pornographers and gambling websites and things like that. Although Wirecard started on the seedier side of the internet, it eventually grew to be worth almost $30 billion and rivaled PayPal in Europe. Along the way, Wirecard developed some powerful friends, like former Chancellor Angela Merkel. At one point, she lobbied the Chinese government to let the company into its massive market. In 2010, Marseilleck became the chief operating officer of Wirecard.

According to former employees, he was largely responsible for running the business. As years progressed, it started doing much more complex work and then it expanded into a bank. It was a perfectly legit bank that was regulated in Germany. And that gave even more kind of opportunity to Marseille and his employees to kind of provide all sorts of financial services from bank accounts to credit cards to major transactions and so on. so on. Okay, it's really remarkable that it went from a company that primarily supported sort of pornography and gambling and became something super legitimate and large. Absolutely. I mean, it was handling payments for major telecom companies, for major airlines, such as Air France and KLM. Its shares were like the hottest thing around in Europe. You know, a number of experts in the field were recommending the share as something in Europe. You know, a number of experts in the

field were recommending the share as something great, as something that's going places. So it really had everything going for it. And how was Marseilleck doing at the time? He led a really lavish lifestyle going to kind of Michelin star restaurants, traveling by business jets all the time, you know, staying in the most expensive hotels around. Marcellex sported a shaved head and wore expensive Italian suits. He also allegedly started telling people a made-up version of his childhood. He told people that he had a degree from the French Lycée, from the French high school of Vienna. And that's why he got his perfect French.

He spoke perfect French. One of his friends and associates was the former president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy. But it turns out he's never even finished high school. You know, here's this guy who doesn't have any kind of credentials that he boasted about and nonetheless was extremely competent in doing what he was doing. nonetheless was extremely competent in doing what he was doing. When he was out socializing, Marseille often bragged to people about a lot more than just where he went to school.

During these kind of lavish dinners and drink parties and whatnot, he would just tell them how he is engaged with the Russian intelligence service and how he does financial services for the German intelligence service. And so he would take these people to dinner and just say, hey, by the way, I know some spies? Yeah, after a couple of glasses of, you know, like extremely expensive wine, he would just kind of move on the conversation to, oh, by the way, I'm engaged with the intelligence community. And I travel a lot to the war zone of Libya, where I am kind of working with a warlord. And people thought, yeah, right, whatever, you know, this guy's a bit weird.

Yeah, I mean, you hear somebody talk about that over dinner. You're like, this guy is like, you know. Yeah, he's cuckoo. I mean, like, basically, people thought he was just making it up. But it seems Marseilleck was not making it up. Authorities now say that through Wirecard, Marseilleck was in fact working with spy agencies, both German and Russian. German intelligence said that two of its agencies, basically the equivalent of the FBI and the CIA, had used Wirecard for credit cards and bank accounts for their agents abroad. Wirecard was also used to pay informants, according to one German intelligence agency.

But officials say Marseilleck was also using Wirecard to help Russian operatives. He was working with Russian intelligence services at very many levels. You know, he was providing all sorts of services that go way beyond spying. I mean, for example, he's believed to have provided Russian secret agents with credit cards, with bank accounts.

He's believed to have set up bank transfers for them. You know, these are rival intelligence services, and obviously they're spying on each other. And they're giving him all of this information. Well, exactly. You know, I was kind of imagining while I was researching this, the kind of fictitious situation where a German secret agent is spying on a Russian secret agent in a cafe and both of them pay with the same credit card. You know, it's quite funny. Through Wirecard, Marsalek had access to

a lot of transaction data, like alias names and agents' movements and activities. Some officials suspect he was passing this information on to Russia. The bank knows everything about you. They know what you buy, where you go, because your location is registered when you use your credit card, you make bank transfers. Now, if you're a company, there's all sorts of customer data, which is confidential, you know. And he asked for all of that to be downloaded and given to him, which is illegal. He just told people, oh, please do this. And when they kind of objected, he said, no, no, no, listen,

the authorities are asking for it, we have to give it to them. And they just took his word for it. So he downloaded all of this enormous amount of data. So what exactly would Moscow do with this information? We don't exactly know the details because it's confidential what was given to them. But Wirecards had thousands and thousands of clients, ranging from ordinary people to major international corporations. A Russian government spokeswoman said allegations of links between Marseille and Russia's intelligence services were a, quote, politicization.

Marseille's German lawyer didn't respond to requests for comment. Counterintelligence officials said that the German agents who were affected had to change their aliases and sever all links to the bank. According to Boyan's reporting, Marseilleck was passing along this financial information while he was the COO of Wirecard. And then, in 2020... Wirecard, the German payments maker, of course, suspended its COO after auditors revealed that nearly $2 billion in cash has gone missing. Extraordinary story. Admission, of course, from payments firm Wirecard this week that the missing $2 billion may never have existed at all.

Wirecard is filing for insolvency. Prosecutors say executives had been inflating the company's revenue for years. The CEO was charged with defrauding investors and other crimes and is currently being tried. He denies wrongdoing and is pleaded not guilty. And Marsalek disappeared. We now know he ended up on that private plane to Minsk, then in that car to Moscow. He was welcomed in Russia.

He was welcomed by the Secret Service of Russia, the FSB, and he was provided with a new Russian identity. He was given a Russian passport, so he was able to kind of reside and continue his life of luxury and ease in Moscow during a time when he was wanted by Interpol. Would you say that the Russians are protecting him? That's certainly what a lot of people in the intelligence and security establishment in the West believe. They believe that basically the Russians are protecting him, yes. What Marseilleck has allegedly been doing since arriving in Russia?

That's after the break. That's after the break. Need a great reason to get up in the morning? Well, what about two? Right now, get a small organic fair trade coffee and a tasty bacon and egg or breakfast sandwich for only $5 at A&W's in Ontario. Marcelec is now an international fugitive. He's on Interpol's most wanted list. But he still gets around.

I was told on his new Russian passport, he's been able to travel to Dubai. Dubai, like Turkey, like some other countries that don't really enforce the sanctions against Russia, has become one of the hubs of Russian business and intelligence. So it's fairly easy to travel, to fly from Moscow to Dubai, especially if you can use a private jet even easier than flying commercial, right? According to intelligence agencies, Marseilleck has stayed in the spy game. His most high-profile assignment? Running operatives in the United Kingdom.

So the Brits told us that they believe Marseilleck got tasked with running the spy ring, including five people. Five people accused of being part of a Russian spy ring operating in the UK. They're all Bulgarian nationals who live in London. And these people seemingly were just kind of ordinary people living in London who were then approached, recruited and trained by the Russian secret services.

And Marsalek became their person who ran them, their spymaster on behalf of the Russian intel in order to generate what they call a plausible deniability. Because the Russian intelligence wanted to put space between them and the spies. Working from outside the UK, Marsalek set up a company that may have helped funnel money to these spies. British prosecutors allege that he was involved in the ring for three years, between 2020 and 2023. These people are suspected of having plotted to kidnap people on behalf of the Russian secret services. We don't know who their targets are because this is a highly sensitive kind of ongoing investigation, but these people we assume were in Britain and also in Europe.

The group of alleged agents have been jailed on charges of spying for Russia. According to Western intelligence, Marseille was also helping another notorious, opaque arm of the Russian power structure. Russia's Wagner mercenary group. The Wagner group. Wagner was meant to be carrying out Russian state structure. Russia's Wagner mercenary group. The Wagner Group. Wagner was meant to be carrying out Russian state interests. They operate almost like a kind of mafia network, teaming up with governments that cooperate with them.

Marseilleck had a unique set of skills, knowledge about different governments, deep experience moving money around, and connections across the globe. It all seemed to make him perfect for the Wagner Group. The Wagner Group has a network of business interests in Africa and the Middle East, and it provides all sorts of services there, including kind of giving mercenary armies to various African potentates who in exchange allow them access to highly valuable resources such as diamonds, gold, timber and so on.

And then they have this enormous trade in these things. So for that they need obviously a financial underpinning, which is extremely complex in their case because they're mixing kind of crime with business and they're subject to sanctions nowadays and all sorts of things. So they need people with the know-how who can kind of build these structures so they can operate in the kind of global financial system. And it is assumed that Marseille was initially helping them to do that. Despite the death of Wagner's leader, Yevgeny Progozhin, last year,

Marseille has stayed active with the organization. Russian officials who are loyal to the Kremlin, they have no intention of shutting down the Wagner operation. They want to expand it even, but they want to put it under the control of the Kremlin. And they're kind of readjusting some things. They're restructuring the whole place. And it seems like Marsalek has been involved

in helping them do that. And you can see how someone with his experience and track record could be extremely useful in an operation like that. And so at this point, what kind of influence does he have? What do we know about his relationship with Russian intelligence at this point? Well, that's an absolute mystery, right? We don't know why they're so beholden to him. I mean, they've provided unique

sort of protection and service to him they've involved him in this operation in london which is also quite a unique situation i've spoken to some kind of seasoned counterintelligence officials and they say it's highly unusual to to put someone in charge of an operation like that who's just like fresh off the boat in Moscow, and he's a fugitive from justice. You know, he's not even Russian. German authorities have issued an international warrant for Marseilleck's arrest. Prosecutors say they're focusing on the wrongdoing that led to Wirecard's demise, though they're aware of the allegations that Marseilleck is a spy.

He's the ultimate confidence trickster. You know, he was described, I spoke to a couple of, you know, corporate lawyers who are pretty kind of hard-nosed business people. And he would walk into a boardroom and then kind of own the space, you know, set the agenda. And people just kind of accepted the leadership and the ideas and the competence that he was offering, you know. And some of them kind of described him as a borderline genius because on one hand, he

was kind of bragging about all sorts of things and people were very skeptical about his stories. On the other hand, he was able to kind of get business done and he was able to build these very intricate, complicated financial schemes required for some of the clients. And he had the know-how, which is quite extraordinary. What would you say the allegations against Marsalek reveal? I think they reveal that, you know, these financial institutions are perhaps vulnerable to penetration from rogue intelligence services.

And I think that kind of aspect of security has not been talked about enough, let's say, before this case. And obviously, like everything else, what was the role of finance in every kind of endeavor? Right. It's the underpinning of everything. You need to make payments, you need to. You know, you need to make payments. You need to shift money around.

You need to stash cash. You need to, you know, pay agents. You need to pay sources. You need to bribe people. You need to buy weapons. Money makes the world go round, including spies. Yeah, exactly. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. by Max Holchester. Thanks for listening.

See you tomorrow.