The former executive for Wirecard in Dubai, Oliver Bellenhaus, continued to explain the Wirecard fraud to the court in Munich. He confessed that his involvement in the alleged Wirecard billion-euro fraud earned him €4.8 million. According to the indictment, Bellenhaus, who worked in Dubai from 2013 to 2020, received this sum as a one-off payment, diverted from company funds, and bypassed the payroll department. His monthly salary was €13,000 he said on Thursday.
“The salary I received at Wirecard was not commensurate with my position for a long time,” Oliver Bellenhaus said Thursday before the fourth criminal chamber of the Munich I Regional Court. The manager, who has been in pre-trial detention for more than two and a half years, was managing director of the subsidiary Cardsystems Middle East in Dubai until the collapse of the scandal group in the summer of 2020.
According to his statement, Bellenhaus demanded a salary increase; he envisaged an annual salary of 900,000 to €950,000. Chief Operating Officer Jan Marsalek had rejected this and proposed a “one-off special payment” of €4.8 million. Bellenhaus invested the money in a foundation in Liechtenstein.
However, the defense lawyers of former Wirecard CEO Markus Braun have accused Bellenhaus of diverting sums in the hundreds of millions from the group. Bellenhaus has repeatedly denied this. He also said he did not own Wirecard shares: “That would have been a bad investment.”
He purportedly slipped into the fraud gradually over the years but did not want to abscond or snitch on the scheme and his co-conspirators: “When I went in somewhere, I never went out backward and cried.“
Through Dubai, Wirecard ran a large part of its bogus business with invented payment services. Over the years, Bellenhaus says, the effort involved in inventing fictitious sales became so great that real business was hardly possible: “There was no time to deal with customers for that either.”
Bellenhaus has been on trial since December along with former CEO Markus Braun and the former chief accountant Stephan von Effra. According to the indictment, they are alleged to have falsified the payment service provider’s balance sheets since 2015 and cheated lending banks out of €3.1 billion.
