Then, on June 18, 2020, Wirecard announced that nearly two billion euros was missing from the company’s accounts. The sum amounted to all the profits that Wirecard had ever reported as a public company. There were only two possibilities: the money had been stolen, or it had never existed.
The Wirecard board placed Marsalek on temporary leave. The missing funds had supposedly been parked in two banks in the Philippines, and Wirecard’s Asia operations were under Marsalek’s purview. Before leaving the office that day, he told people that he was going to Manila, to track down the money.
Philippine immigration records show that Jan Marsalek entered the country four days later, on June 23rd. But, like almost everything about Wirecard, the records had been faked. Although Austrians generally aren’t allowed dual citizenship, Marsalek held at least eight passports, including diplomatic cover from the tiny Caribbean nation of Grenada. His departure from Bad Vöslau is the last instance in which he is known to have used his real name.
“Next time, could you not use your podcast voice?”Cartoon by Sophia GlockCopy link to cartoonCopy link to cartoonLink copied
“Uh, well . . . I’m, I’m . . . I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, I’m not . . . You’re breaking up,” the guest said. (Upstart’s share price has since dropped by ninety-five per cent.)
In the summer of 2014, McCrum was casting about for story ideas in London when a hedge-fund manager asked him, “Would you be interested in some German gangsters?” He added, “Be careful.”
The core tenet of the business was that for anything to be sold there must be a way to pay. The fewer the options for payment, the higher the fees; the higher the legal risk, the more complex the transaction.
“Don’t pause it—just let me ask you questions for the next twenty minutes.”Cartoon by José ArroyoCopy link to cartoonCopy link to cartoonLink copied
Wirecard had carved out a profitable, if tenuous, operation. But the major poker companies began to ditch Wirecard and its affiliates, to work with better-run businesses; pornography, meanwhile, was now ubiquitous and free. In 2009, although the business was struggling, Braun prepared for investors an unrealistic set of projections that showed a forty-five-degree line of profits and growth, and soon afterward the chief operating officer quit.
By now, a German investor named Tobias Bosler had discovered irregularities on Wirecard’s balance sheet. He eventually suspected that the company was also miscoding illegal gambling transactions as legal ones, so he asked a friend in America to transfer money to a Wirecard-affiliated poker site. “The money went to the poker Web site, but on the monthly statement it showed a French online store for mobile phones,” Bosler told me.
Murphy brought McCrum onto his team. “I needed someone who had the kind of hard-core technical ability to take balance sheets apart,” Murphy told me. Although McCrum didn’t yet have enough evidence to use the word “fraud” in print, Murphy, as he recalled, encouraged McCrum, “Just use Alphaville as a platform, to get out your suspicions.”
The resulting series, “House of Wirecard,” ran in the spring of 2015. But even Alphaville’s finance-savvy readership struggled to make sense of the material. “This article could do with a paragraph that states, in plain english, what the author’s point is,” one reader commented. “There are a lot of facts presented, but their significance is lost on me.”
Cartoon by Corey Pandolph and Craig BaldoCopy link to cartoonCopy link to cartoonLink copied
Wirecard’s response was less ambivalent. It spent much of the next few years seeking to create the impression that it was the victim of a criminal conspiracy between short sellers—who make money when a stock craters—and journalists, whom they paid off.
Murphy, who is sixty, has been covering the London finance scene for so long that he still answers his phone by announcing his surname, as if on a landline with no caller I.D. In 2016, he got a call from one of his bandits, a businessman, spread-betting speculator, and night-club owner from Essex named Gary Kilbey. “What’s this stuff you lot are writing about Wirecard?” Kilbey asked. “Are you sure it’s right?”
“Yeah, it’s fucking right,” Murphy replied.
“I’ve got a guy who says it’s all wrong,” Kilbey said. “He doesn’t like Dan. He wants to talk to you.” That guy was Jan Marsalek; he had got another spread-betting speculator (who had previously pleaded guilty to securities fraud) to employ Kilbey as an intermediate.
Almost two years passed before Marsalek made another overture. Again, the approach was indirect; another of Murphy’s sources casually mentioned to him over a lunch of lobster linguini that Marsalek would pay him “good money” to stop publishing reports about Wirecard. “I’m serious,” the man said. “I’ve heard ten million thrown about.”
“He was obviously interesting—he knew people, and he was throwing a lot of money around,” Murphy told me. “So I started developing Marsalek as a potential source.”
At another lunch, Murphy promised that the F.T. wouldn’t publish more stories based on Wirecard’s past indiscretions, and Marsalek swore to Murphy that there was nothing new to find. They shook hands. After Murphy walked out of the restaurant, Gary Kilbey told Marsalek, “Look, if you are lying, Paul will find out. He will find out, and you’ll be buried.”
In 2016, Marsalek helped facilitate a deployment of Russian mercenaries into Libya. An American businessman—who had partnered with Wirecard on an electronic-payments startup—had invested in a cement plant near Benghazi, and he needed the facility cleared of unexploded remnants of war. Marsalek suggested one of his Russian friends, Stanislav Petlinsky, an executive at a security company.
“He has this crazy conspiracy theory about object permanence.”Cartoon by Paul NothCopy link to cartoonCopy link to cartoonLink copied
British chemical-weapons analysts determined that the substance was Novichok, a deadly nerve agent devised decades earlier by Soviet military intelligence. In response, the U.K. expelled twenty-three Russian diplomats, who were suspected of being intelligence officers, and launched an inquiry into fourteen other deaths of Russian exiles and businessmen in the U.K.
That fall, Marsalek summoned Murphy to Germany for another lunch, in a private dining room, and handed him a stack of documents. They contained official Russian government talking points, addressed to the U.N.’s chemical-weapons body, casting doubt on the British investigation of the Skripal poisoning. The files—marked classified—also contained the chemical formula for Novichok. “Where did you get these?” Murphy asked. Marsalek smiled and said, “Friends.”
In August, 2018, Wirecard had a market capitalization of twenty-eight billion dollars. The company displaced Commerzbank from the DAX 30, Germany’s most prestigious stock index.
Markus Braun—who owned eight per cent of the company and was now a billionaire, on paper—had taken out a personal loan of a hundred and fifty million euros from Deutsche Bank, using his Wirecard shares as collateral. Marsalek, for his part, appears to have defrauded the company out of tens of millions of euros, if not hundreds of millions, according to a whistle-blower.
While Murphy puzzled over Marsalek’s Russian security connections, McCrum had a new investigative thread to follow. Pav Gill, the head lawyer at Wirecard’s Asia division, in Singapore, had quit, taking seventy gigabytes of e-mails with him. As he agonized over what to do with the materials, he learned that his mother had written to McCrum. “Oh, my God, Mum,” Gill said, when he found out. “What have you done?”
By the morning of January 30, 2019, the story was complete and ready to run in the F.T. McCrum sent off questions to Wirecard, and waited for the company’s response.
At lunchtime, Paul Murphy went to Sweetings for a crab sandwich and a glass of white wine. Then Gary Kilbey called. A broker had stopped at Kilbey’s office, above his night club, to let him know that a popular spread-betting account was “shorting the absolute bollocks off Wirecard,” as he put it. The hot rumor in the London finance scene was that the F.T. would publish a hit piece at 1 P.M. “You’ve got a fucking leak,” Kilbey said.
Murphy rushed back to F.T. headquarters. “We’ve got a fucking leak!” he shouted.
“He’s perfect, but he lives all the way on the other side of the apple.”Cartoon by Suerynn LeeCopy link to cartoonCopy link to cartoonLink copied
How had the story slipped out? McCrum and Murphy had taken unusual precautions—speaking about the story only in person, never on the phone. The story hadn’t even been uploaded into the F.T.’s internal system. But one of Kilbey’s details was off: the F.T. planned to publish that afternoon but had never settled on an exact time—1 P.M. was the deadline it had given Wirecard for comment. It seemed impossible that anyone but the company had been the source of the disclosure.
Murphy went over to a Reuters terminal and pulled up the Wirecard stock listing. “We literally sat there watching the share price drop as it approached one o’clock,” he told me. “And then there was no story, so people started buying.” They waited two more hours for Wirecard to reply. Then, as Murphy put it, “you hit Publish, and then you almost throw up.”
The headline said “forged contracts”; the subtitle, “Falsification of Accounts.” The article wiped five billion euros from Wirecard’s value in a single afternoon. A follow-up piece, published two days later, knocked off three billion more.
The response in Germany was reflexively defensive, as if the F.T.’s reporting were an attack on the country itself. “Another fake news article from Dan McCrum,” a Commerzbank equities analyst wrote, in a letter to investors. Any dip in share price was “a buying opportunity.” “I read in the FT what a naughty boy you are,” a member of Deutsche Bank’s supervisory board wrote to Markus Braun. He added a winking emoji, and said that he had just bought Wirecard shares. “Do this newspaper in!!”
On February 18, 2019, Germany’s financial regulator, known as BaFin, issued a ban on creating new short bets against Wirecard, citing the company’s “importance for the economy.” “It was at that moment that they sided with criminals,” a German parliamentarian later said. The same day, prosecutors in Munich confirmed to a German newspaper that they had opened a criminal investigation. But they weren’t going after Wirecard—they were going after the F.T.
Quadir grew up on Long Island, as the second daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, and studied biology and mathematics in college before getting a job in finance—an industry that she holds largely in contempt.
“In finance, globally, you have a situation where the only effective police are the Americans,” Paul Murphy told me. “Our regulators—they’re out to lunch. Incompetent, mainly.” He added, “What you’ll find, say, here in London is that you can be a crook, stealing money from people around the world. As long as you’re not stealing from people in Britain, you can do anything.”
In early 2019, Quadir and Clementi set off in Clementi’s 2002 Volkswagen Cabrio for Wirecard’s U.S. headquarters, which were registered in an office park in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia. In Suite 5040, they found an office space large enough for perhaps six hundred employees. But only a couple of dozen people were there.
A man who greeted them offered to sell them prepaid cards loaded with up to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and added that it would be perfectly acceptable for them to distribute the cards to other people. Quadir and Clementi were stunned. “You can’t find prepaid cards loaded with more than ten thousand dollars on the dark Web,” Quadir told me.
In February, 2019, Marsalek met with Munich’s top public prosecutor, Hilde Bäumler-Hösl. He told her that he had spent years infiltrating the London spread-betting scene, as a matter of “enemy reconnaissance,” and that the F.T. was colluding with short sellers. Three days later, Bäumler-Hösl issued a statement to the German press: “We received serious information from Wirecard that a new short attack is planned, and that a lot of money is being used to influence media reporting.”
outside is calling.”Cartoon by Lawrence LindellCopy link to cartoonCopy link to cartoonLink copied
This was not the only defensive action that Marsalek took
Wirecard signed an agreement with Arcanum Global Intelligence
a strategic-intelligence firm whose leadership is made up of former senior British
and Israeli intelligence and military leaders
Representatives for Arcanum insist that the firm’s work for Wirecard consisted only of an internal investigation into Pav Gill’s leak of confidential information from the Singapore branch
days after McCrum’s first article about the Asia division
to “investigate and identify short sellers” and to carry out a multi-stage “plan of attack.” Although Arcanum’s leadership claims that the proposal was never executed
addressed to the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority
says that Arcanum was “retained by Wirecard to investigate a series of short selling attacks.”
“Phase I will be a ‘scoping and disclosure phase’ where all existing information and initial intelligence findings are reviewed,” the proposal read
The next phase would include “more targeted and in-depth intelligence collection and analysis.” Targets’ “wrongdoings and vulnerabilities” would be “judiciously pursued.” For a fee of two hundred thousand euros a month
former “senior leaders from the world’s most powerful intelligence and law enforcement agencies,” as Arcanum put it
would deploy their combined networks and expertise in the service of Wirecard
McCrum had continued to investigate Wirecard’s activities in Asia
Half of its global sales appeared to come through three clients: one in Dubai
McCrum’s colleague Stefania Palma set off for Manila
Its supposed headquarters turned out to be shared with a bus company
was a private home in a remote village surrounded by rice paddies
who were grooming a small white poodle and a Pomeranian
Then a family member produced a few scraps of mail
Marsalek had fully entrenched himself in the affairs of his Russian mercenary friend
to sell the mercenaries its prepaid-debit-card software
In an encrypted chat with Dagmar Schneider
a senior member of Wirecard’s finance team
Marsalek wrote that if auditors had questions about R.S.B
As McCrum and Palma closed in on the fraud in the Philippines
Marsalek joked with Schneider about having people “shot by MY Russians at RSB.” The following week
he wrote to her that he had “been struggling with the FT since 5 in the morning.”
“Send YOUR Russians to London,” Schneider replied
McCrum and Palma published their investigation into Wirecard’s partners on March 28th; two weeks later
BaFin filed a criminal complaint against them for “suspicion of market manipulation of Wirecard shares.” Outside investors took the German government’s actions as a powerful signal
which runs the world’s largest tech-focussed venture-capital fund
in exchange for bonds that could be converted into a 5.6-per-cent stake
stories still rattled the SoftBank team enough to ask to see lists of Wirecard’s biggest clients in Asia—which Marsalek faked
Wirecard treated every short seller as an existential threat
another of Gary Kilbey’s contacts in the London spread-betting scene
and offered him three million pounds to persuade a rich friend to stop shorting Wirecard
and thought that the way he held his cup of coffee suggested that he was “a loser.” Only a crooked company
would send a senior executive to hunt down its critics
who now works as a private investigator and goes by Jon
was hired to work for a client who had set up temporary residency at the Dorchester hotel
with close-cropped hair and an even stubble
and tipped the hotel staff with high-denomination notes
“He wanted countersurveillance on himself when he was in the U.K.
to make sure that no one was following him,” Jon told me
Jon doesn’t like the term “private investigator,” because he thinks it diminishes the scope of what he does
he collects the travel histories and police files of five to ten targets
They don’t know his full name—they just know not to ask questions
and his duties range from spying on philandering spouses to helping international criminal gangs insure that a stolen passport can be used to get a murderer across a border
“There’s a lot that is very questionable that I can do
you have to have morals—or you’re meant to
That’s the whole point of being a police officer
And then you come out into the private sector and—let’s be honest—it really doesn’t matter.” For almost four hours
on the condition that I neither publish his full name nor describe him physically
The client at the Dorchester introduced himself as Rami
and learned that he had briefly served as the head of foreign intelligence for Libya’s transitional government
El Obeidi wore high-end Italian clothing brands
and he moved with ease through the strange world of former military and intelligence officers
He was apparently a major Wirecard investor
and a regular visitor to Marsalek’s secret mansion near the Russian consulate in Munich
El Obeidi had come to London to run an intelligence operation of his own
who had somehow been named as a suspect in BaFin’s complaint
Gold had made a fortune selling industrial supplies
and gambled it wherever he thought he had an edge
charismatic party host in his forties who did lots of cocaine and dazzled guests with card tricks at his mansions in London
“I used to go up to Oxford Street when I was seventeen and I would hustle people,” he told me
he has been banned from casinos for counting cards
and from betting on horse racing for coördinating with jockeys to throw races
before betting on how long it would take for a soccer match to reach its first throw-in
he paid off a player to kick the ball out of bounds in the opening seconds of the game
“It’s not gambling if I know the outcome,” he insisted
I’ve never played a game I thought I could lose.”
Paul Murphy met Gold at Gary Kilbey’s sixtieth-birthday party
a raucous gathering at which Kilbey urged his guests to “drink as much as you can take.” Murphy had heard that Gold was a partial owner of the Box
where the hostess reportedly welcomed guests to the 1 A.M
burlesque show with instructions to “answer every fetish” and “do all the cocaine you can.” As Gold remembers the encounter
Murphy gave him his number and invited him to call if he ever had a newsworthy tip
Murphy’s recollection was of something more instrumental: “I wanted to send in a young
female reporter to harvest crap from him.”
to pitch a story about a sports-betting company
But Murphy told him that he had no time to talk—he was tied up with Wirecard matters
‘I’m stuck on Wirecard,’ I knew this was a no-brainer scenario,” Gold recalled
“I have to short sell this company within an inch of my life
a mutual acquaintance of El Obeidi and Gold’s
casually bumped into Gold at a party in Cannes
was “dancing on tables and being a lunatic
as I am—having a great time” when Rubie approached him and said that he was working for a group of foreign investors who were looking to invest billions
Gold invited Rubie to bring the investors to his office in London the following week
accompanied by a man from Lancashire who claimed to represent the foreign investors
he was a private-intelligence operative working for El Obeidi
was about to publish a story that would send the share price to zero
he assured them: his source was the investigations editor
“German politicians were proud to be able to say
we have a fintech company!” a parliamentarian observed.By coincidence
Dan McCrum sent Wirecard a series of questions
revealing he knew that most of the company’s operations in Dubai were centered on fake customers
who had already received a copy of the Nick Gold recording from El Obeidi
who suggested that they share the recording and McCrum’s suspiciously timed questions with Sönke Iwersen
the head of investigations at Handelsblatt
The private investigator from Lancashire spoke to Iwersen on “deep background,” to supply details without being named
He mentioned that he had been working for a Wirecard investor but omitted that the investor was a former Libyan spy
saying that Wirecard had passed evidence of insider trading between Nick Gold and Paul Murphy to the British and German authorities
The letter demanded that the paper not publish any Wirecard stories until investigations were complete
Murphy immediately texted Gold and told him that he had been recorded
but you’ve just done something really dumb,” Lionel Barber
Murphy offered Barber a full audit of his finances
But it wasn’t enough; the reputation of the paper was on the line
“But when this came up I had to do something.” He hired outside counsel to investigate Murphy and McCrum
“You’re going to have to spend some time in the sin bin,” he told Murphy
delegated legal authority to the Arcanum officers to act on its behalf “in any such way that they consider necessary and lawful.” Arcanum’s vice-chairman at the time
Keith Bristow—who had served as the first director-general of the U.K.’s National Crime Agency—met with the Financial Conduct Authority
as part of Wirecard’s effort to get the agency to investigate the F.T
declined to comment on its relationship with Arcanum.) Arcanum’s leadership includes a former director of national intelligence in the U.S
The group capitalized on its connections even when it had no clarity on the origins of the information it shared
Although the Arcanum team had apparently never heard of El Obeidi
it drafted a letter to the British authorities in which it claimed to have “considerable knowledge” of the “events and subjects of interest” leading up to El Obeidi’s sting operation on Gold
El Obeidi hired twenty-eight operatives to set out on the streets of London
and the operatives communicated with one another through a private walkie-talkie channel
There were a number of targets—all short sellers in London
I would have just gone along with it,” he told me
in some ways I wish I had.” The team was instructed to use only legal practices
so that any intelligence collected would stand up in court
It had a running cost of eighteen thousand pounds per day
and employed some of the most comprehensive
“I felt terribly sorry for him,” he said of Gold
Jon called Gold’s housekeeper from a burner phone
and needed Gold to call him about an ongoing investigation
“They’re doing a huge surveillance operation on you,” Jon told him
“I think you’re going to get fucked over here
in the business long enough to know when someone’s high on coke,” Jon said
One of my contacts at the Financial Times is Paul Murphy
You’ve got to tell him about the surveillance operation!’ ” They went to Claridge’s
Jon supplied him with Palladium documents and told him what he knew of the operational structure
Murphy asked Jon to prove his access and credentials
a man on Murphy’s team named Kadhim Shubber
“he sends me a fucking picture of Kadhim’s mum’s passport!”
what a small bloody world this is!” he said
the former MI5 officer who was running El Obeidi’s operation on the ground
and I’d had a couple of drinks.” He texted Elvins that he could “obv see the damage to your firm we are about to do,” and added
“Work with me and I promise we won’t fuck you over.” Her reply came in the form of a complaint from her lawyers
these stories—they don’t just float in through the fucking window!” he shouted
I want the fucking fraud nailed,” Barber replied
And the story is not that you’re texting some ex-MI5 agent at eleven o’clock at night!”
the external law firm cleared Murphy and McCrum
they had been quietly preparing the paper’s final blow—a straightforward piece that presented tangible proof of fraud and included all the underlying Wirecard spreadsheets and e-mails
The instructions from Lionel Barber were to “draw blood.”
The story was so damning that investors called for a forensic audit
But the investigation would take six months
assured stock analysts that it would put to rest any concerns
“the fucking share price goes up,” Murphy said
people like Nick Gold actually were going mad
slumped over his steering wheel.” (As Gold tells it
he had mixed alcohol and Xanax and pulled over for a nap on the side of the road.) “Nobody knew who to trust,” Murphy continued
“In this entire broad community that believed Wirecard was a fraud—and by this time it was kind of a wide community—everybody was fucking paranoid about everybody else.”
His last known phone activity was last year.In the following months
the attacks on short sellers grew increasingly personal
Fahmi Quadir was punched in the head by a masked man with brass knuckles while walking her poodle on the Upper West Side; she was knocked unconscious
It also appeared as if operatives were collecting detailed information on Nick Gold’s trades; in the next few months
with losses into the tens of millions of pounds
and I walk out with the hottest girl you’ve ever seen,” he told me
“Fifteen out of ten.” But it was a trap; a blackmail recording of the liaison arrived by e-mail
“The worst part was that I had my socks all the way up,” Gold
“You don’t want to be seen fucking with white socks up at my age.”
In the year leading up to Wirecard’s collapse
the leadership plotted a takeover of Deutsche Bank—an acquisition so huge that Wirecard’s balance-sheet fraud might be buried in the deal
“It was essentially Braun’s last roll of the dice,” Murphy said
The auditors focussed on two bank accounts in the Philippines
which purportedly held the missing two billion euros
COVID restrictions complicated the auditors’ ability to visit the banks in person
so Wirecard reportedly hired Filipino actors
and asked Wirecard to prove that it controlled the funds by transferring four hundred million euros to one of its accounts in Germany
When Wirecard failed to perform the transfer
the auditors contacted the Philippine banks directly—both of which replied that Wirecard’s accounts did not exist
Braun was required to announce the auditors’ findings
Wirecard’s share price plummeted eighty per cent
and the company was soon forced into bankruptcy
Fahmi Quadir’s short bet cleared tens of millions of dollars
A couple of larger funds made hundreds of millions
“We consistently underestimated people’s ability to look the other way,” Leo Perry
there was a raft of resignations and firings: Felix Hufeld
the head of BaFin; the head of Germany’s audit regulator; several leading Wirecard analysts at other European banks
A German parliamentary inquiry held a hundred witness hearings and reviewed nearly four hundred thousand pages of documents
concluding that the behavior of Wirecard and its enablers was “the largest financial scandal in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany.” The report blamed “collective supervisory failure,” “the longing for a digital national champion,” and “the German mentality toward non-Germans”—specifically
“German supervisory authorities are not fit for the ‘Internet Age,’ ” the report concluded
told the parliamentary inquiry that he bore no direct responsibility for what had taken place under his watch
He maintains that he is an unwitting victim of a scheme orchestrated by Marsalek and others
recently testified that the company’s partnerships in Asia were “a sham right from the beginning.”
“You cannot understand Wirecard if you understand Wirecard only as fraud,” Felix Holtermann
it’s not a Bernie Madoff case.” According to Holtermann
who has also written a book about the company
Marsalek routinely “used his power to override Wirecard’s very
very small compliance department” to issue bank accounts
and debit cards to Russian oligarchs who were on European financial blacklists
the money-laundering saloon of Europe,” he said
and intelligence agencies have turned up an array of astonishing facts about Marsalek’s activities outside Wirecard
At his secret mansion near the Russian consulate
he regularly hosted gatherings with government officials and spies
Marsalek was also dabbling in political affairs
A major issue in the lead-up to Austria’s 2017 elections was migration from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East
Marsalek—who was connected to members of Austria’s far right—started developing plans to assemble a fifteen-thousand-man militia in southern Libya
to prevent migrants from reaching Mediterranean shores
Organizational meetings were held at the mansion in Munich
and included current and former senior members of Austria’s defense and interior departments
The project’s security adviser was Andrey Chuprygin
a former Russian lieutenant colonel and a professor of political economy who is widely suspected
of maintaining a close relationship with Russia’s military intelligence agency
that he advised Marsalek only on “shifting politics and tribal dynamics.”)
Marsalek asked an Austrian intelligence officer named Egisto Ott to design a surveillance-proof room in the mansion
“It was a complete botch,” an independent security professional later testified
“The execution was extremely poor.” But Ott was useful in other ways
Under the direction of his former boss Martin Weiss—the onetime head of operations at Austria’s intelligence agency
the B.V.T.—he carried out regular background checks on Marsalek’s behalf
according to thousands of pages of leaked Austrian investigative files
Marsalek allegedly paid for searches on at least twenty-five people whom he suspected of having ties to intelligence agencies
Neither man still had access to the B.V.T.’s systems—Weiss had resigned his post
who was suspected of selling state secrets to Russia
had been reassigned to work at Austria’s police academy
But they managed to run the searches regardless
He seemed to take every opportunity to play a part in political matters
he involved himself in an effort to relocate Austria’s Israeli Embassy to Jerusalem
to align with the policy of President Donald Trump
Marsalek’s name was found on a list of possible seed investors in a company that would buy the remains of Cambridge Analytica
the data-collection firm that was mired in scandal for its role in influencing elections
Marsalek seemed to get a thrill out of telling people that he had body-cam videos of horrific battlefield violence
saying that they showed “the boys” killing prisoners
He boasted that Petlinsky had taken him to Syria to embed with Russian soldiers
on a joyride to the ancient city of Palmyra
Marsalek “wanted to be a secret agent.” But there’s no concrete evidence that he was
Marsalek’s position at Wirecard gave him access to materials that might be of interest to a foreign intelligence service
the company began issuing credit cards with false names to the German Federal Criminal Police Office
for use during undercover investigations—meaning that Marsalek might have had insights into the agency’s operational spending
claimed that it was unaware of his connections to Russian intelligence
Marsalek led an effort at Wirecard—in partnership with private Swiss and Lebanese banks—to issue anonymous debit cards that could be preloaded with up to two million euros per year
he told Mastercard that such cards would spare ultra-high-net-worth individuals the annoyance of being asked for stock tips
when a waiter took a credit card and learned the client’s name
But it is difficult to conceive of a more useful setup for covert operational expenses—an anonymous asset
or moving large sums of cash across borders
Jan Marsalek’s getaway jet landed in Minsk
Both men have changed their names; Petlinsky’s whereabouts are unknown
Germany sent an extradition request for Marsalek to Russian law-enforcement agencies
They replied that they had no address for Marsalek
and no record of his having entered the country
His last known phone activity was last year
just because of the logistics of how all sorts of systems work when you travel,” Jon
“Every time a passport is visually scanned into another country
we can get those records here.” He speculated that Marsalek will soon be “drained of all his money,” and recalled clients “who have done disappearing acts,” made it to Russia
a grainy photo appeared to show Marsalek in an upscale Moscow neighborhood
wearing a red Prada jacket and climbing into an S.U.V
“It actually does look like him,” Rami El Obeidi
he never wore Prada (unless Russia got the better side of him)
A long-ago crime, suddenly remembered
A limousine driver watches her passengers transform
The day Muhammad Ali punched me
What is it like to be keenly intelligent but deeply alienated from simple emotions? Temple Grandin knows
The harsh realm of “gentle parenting.”
Retirement the Margaritaville way
Fiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Thank You for the Light.”
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professor of musicology in Kent State University’s Hugh A
has been awarded the Beethoven Medal in recognition of his musicological contributions to the study of composer Ludwig van Beethoven
Albrecht received the award during the International Beethoven-Days 2017 in Baden
weeklong music festival and conference held in Austria
The award was presented by festival director Eduard Melkus
The certificate accompanying the medal reads “Beethoven Medal of the City of Baden presented to Prof
Theodore Albrecht in gratitude for his extraordinary service on behalf of the works of Beethoven.” Previous recipients include world-famous pianists Paul Badura-Skoda and Joerg Demus
The Beethoven-Days festival celebrates the life and work of composer Ludwig van Beethoven
Participants of the festival attend several concerts of the composer’s music and hear the latest musicological research
titled “Miscellaneous Bagatelles about Beethoven” as part of the Musicological Conference
detailing the later years of the composer’s life
he also conducted additional research in Vienna’s City Archive
teaching musicology and music history classes
He is most widely known for his work in classical and romantic music
In addition to his internationally renowned Beethoven expertise
his other areas of specialty include ragtime composer Scott Joplin and country-Western singer-satirist Kinky Friedman
Albrecht’s other awards include the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for his three-volume publication “Letters to Beethoven” and a Distinguished Faculty Award from Kent State’s College of the Arts
Connecting decision makers to a dynamic network of information
Bloomberg quickly and accurately delivers business and financial information
according to an arrest warrant seen by Bloomberg
Jan Marsalek, the German payments company’s ex-chief operating officer who is on Interpol’s most-wanted list
fled in June shortly before Wirecard filed for insolvency
Executives admitted that 1.9 billion euros in funds never existed
setting off one of Germany’s biggest accounting scandals
Noch befindet sich Bad Vöslau mitten im HLA-Abstiegskampf
Doch in der Thermalstadt sind auch die Planungen für die kommende Saison bereits voll im Gange
Und am Sonntag vermeldeten die Jags den ersten Neuzugang für die kommende Saison
Es ist ein echter Kracher: Nationalteam-Kreisläufer Fabian Posch wechselt im Sommer aus Krems nach Bad Vöslau
Der Herbstmeister verlor Mitte April auswärts gegen die SG Bad Vöslau/Kottingbrunn mit 0:3 und Stürmer Nico Bock und musste nun am Staatsfeiertag den endgültigen Knock-out im Titelrennen hinnehmen
Gegen Langenlebarn setzte es in letzter Sekunde eine 1:2-Niederlage.