The Munich Regional Court on 12 September 2025 convicted Markus Braun, the former chief executive of collapsed payments group Wirecard, on all counts in connection with the €1.9 billion accounting fraud that led to the company’s spectacular insolvency in June 2020. Braun received a custodial sentence of fourteen years and two months, close to the statutory maximum for the most serious offences charged.
The verdict, read by presiding judge Markus Födisch after a trial that began in December 2022, ends the prosecution phase of what has become the most consequential corporate-fraud case in modern German history.
Asia, escrow, and a missing €1.9 billion
At the heart of the case was the discovery in June 2020 that €1.9 billion supposedly held in trust accounts at two Philippine banks did not, in fact, exist. The funds were claimed to represent the proceeds of Wirecard’s “third-party acquiring” business in Asia, in which third-party processors purportedly handled transactions on Wirecard’s behalf in jurisdictions where the German company itself was not licensed.
The Munich prosecution accepted what had been the central thesis of short-sellers and Financial Times reporters for years: that the third-party acquiring business was largely fictitious, and that the “missing” €1.9 billion had never existed in the first place. Braun’s defence, that the funds had genuinely existed but had been siphoned off by his former colleague Jan Marsalek, was rejected on the basis of internal documents, witness testimony and the absence of any corroborating bank records.
Marsalek still at large
Jan Marsalek, Wirecard’s former chief operating officer, fled Germany shortly before the company’s collapse and has remained at large. Multiple investigations, including by the Bellingcat collective and German federal prosecutors, have placed him in Moscow under the protection of Russian intelligence. He was indicted in absentia in Germany in 2024 and faces separate espionage allegations.
The Munich court relied on Marsalek-linked emails and Telegram messages recovered from co-defendants, who received reduced sentences in exchange for cooperation.
BaFin and the auditor
The Wirecard collapse triggered the most far-reaching shake-up of German financial supervision in two decades. BaFin, the financial regulator, was restructured, its chief Felix Hufeld replaced, and direct supervisory responsibility for so-called “capital-market-oriented” companies expanded. Auditor EY, which had signed off on Wirecard’s accounts for a decade, faces multiple civil suits totalling more than €1.5 billion and a regulatory investigation that has barred it from auditing newly-listed German issuers until 2026.
The Braun verdict closes one chapter, but the asset-recovery and civil-liability phase of the Wirecard story is expected to run for years to come.
