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Markus Braun denies fraud charges.

 The testi­mony of Braun comes more than two months after the start of the trial. The former chief and two other

Wirecard

former senior Wir­e­card man­agers face charges of fraud, embez­zle­ment, mar­ket and account­ing manip­u­la­tion. Braun, who has been in police cus­tody for more than two and a half years, has been implic­ated in the scan­dal by a former col­league who has turned chief wit­ness. Wir­e­card col­lapsed in June 2020 after dis­clos­ing that €1.9bn in cash and half of its repor­ted rev­enue did not exist.

Braun’s testi­mony to a panel of five judges yes­ter­day marks his first pub­lic state­ment since a brief appear­ance in front of a par­lia­ment­ary inquiry com­mit­tee in late 2020, when he did not answer ques­tions. Braun told the court he had assumed that all those oper­a­tions and the cash on trustee accounts in Asia «fully» exis­ted. His law­yer pre­vi­ously argued that the out­sourced oper­a­tions were real, but the pro­ceeds were siphoned off by Wir­e­card’s fugit­ive second-in-com­mand Jan Mar­s­alek and oth­ers without Braun’s know­ledge. The former chief’s testi­mony is at odds with that of chief wit­ness Oliver Bel­len­haus, one of the Wir­e­card employ­ees who orches­trated a fraud he said involved for­ging doc­u­ments and deceiv­ing aud­it­ors, investors and banks on the behest of Braun and oth­ers.
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