New research in Germany has corroborated suspicions of money laundering surrounding the collapsed Wirecard. New analyses of the money flows are said to show that money laundering took place around Wirecard and its satellite companies. The public prosecutor’s office is still searching for the missing €1.9 billion, which allegedly did not exist. So was the Wirecard scheme a big money laundering scheme? The new analyses suggest so!
Most recently, a former Wirecard manager was arrested in Singapore for falsifying documents in the context of the vanished Wirecard billions. New research shows that Wirecard‘s satellite companies (third-party partners) such as PayEasy and Centurion, based in the Philippines, have received large sums in the millions from numerous companies.
According to older FT reports, the three Wirecard partners, Senjo Group, PayEasy, and Al Alam, generated more than 50% of the Wirecard revenues for 2016 and contributed €290 million or 95% to the Wirecard EBITDA.
The new analysis shows that remittances from the partner PayEasy are particularly striking. The company transferred millions to Pittodrie Finance Limited in Hong Kong every month in 2018, totaling 100 million euros. Centurion, in turn, forwarded more than 40 million euros to shell companies on the Caribbean island of Antigua and to Indonesia in 2018 alone.
From January to December 2018, a company called Xprt Services S.R.O. transferred more than 19 million euros to a Centurion account in more than 50 tranches. The Czech citizen Roni Reich is registered as the owner of Xprt Services. The company had a turnover of €30,000 in 2018 but transferred €19 million in commissions to Centurion in the same year! This raises some questions, doesn’t it? The company went into liquidation.
From Podgorica, Montenegro, several companies with the same address transferred sums of millions to Centurion and PayEasy from accounts at Atlas Banka Podgorica. Atlas Banka has allegedly engaged in large-scale money laundering in recent years and is currently the subject of investigations by the authorities.
