Financial services provider Public prosecutor charges two further Wirecard board members

After more than four years of investigations into the Wirecard scandal, the public prosecutor's office has charged two further former members of the collapsed financial group's Management Board. This is despite the fact that they are not alleged to have been involved in the billion-euro fraud.

Investigators are accusing the former CFO Alexander von Knoop and Susanne Steidl, the former manager responsible for product development on the Wirecard Management Board, of several cases of embezzlement resulting in losses of several hundred million euros for the group, which was once listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. The two are alleged to have been involved in Board of Management decisions to allocate company funds to Wirecard business partners without collateral. In the next step, a regional court in Munich must now decide whether to admit the charges.

The investigators do not assume that the two were involved in the alleged billion-euro fraud for which the former CEO Markus Braun and two other former Wirecard managers have been on trial since December 2022. However, they are alleged to have breached their duties because they gave out company money virtually in the blue. Among other things, this concerns a loan of 100 million euros that Wirecard transferred to a Singapore company called Ocap in spring 2020 without collateral, according to the public prosecutor's office. According to the findings so far in the trial against Braun, Ocap was part of a network of companies that was difficult to see through, through which Wirecard funds were routed back and forth to ultimately disappear into dark channels.

Mr. von Knoops' lawyers also emphasized that the former CFO had "at no time been aware of any machinations to the detriment of Wirecard AG and its shareholders by other responsible persons in the Wirecard Group". "At no time did Mr. von Knoop have the intention or even the idea of harming Wirecard Group companies in his actions." A spokesperson for Steidl said that he could not comment on any ongoing proceedings.

Steidl and von Knoop were promoted to the Wirecard Management Board in January 2018, long after Braun and a number of accomplices inside and outside the Group were alleged to have formed a fraud gang, according to investigations by the public prosecutor's office. Steidl, who, like Braun and the former Chief Sales Officer Jan Marsalek, who has been in hiding since 2020, comes from Austria, had also personally emphasized as a witness in the trial that she knew nothing about fraud.

The Wirecard gang suspected by the prosecution, with Braun and Marsalek in key roles, is said to have inflated the payment service provider's balance sheets for years with fictitious sham transactions in order to keep the actually loss-making group afloat. According to the indictment, the main victims were the lending banks, with the public prosecutor's office estimating the fraud damage at a good three billion euros. Braun has denied all allegations since the start of the trial.