It can now be safely assumed that former Wirecard chief operating officer Jan Marsalek is one of the most wanted men on the planet today.
The company this top honcho oversaw operationally -- the German payment processing giant Wirecard -- crumbled figuratively overnight last month after auditors dug into almost a 2 billion-euro anomaly in the company's ledgers.
The irregularity was the result of the acknowledgment that the money of the same amount - which was believed to be kept in third-party trustee bank accounts somewhere in East Asia was, in fact, non-existent, Christo Grozev of Bellingcat reported. The 40-year-old Marsalek was the man behind Wirecard's Asian operations.
On July 18, investigative journalism outlet Bellingcat revealed that the hunt for Marsalek may be over: The man-at-large is suspected to be hiding in Minsk, the capital city of Belarus.
His whereabouts were determined by Bellingcat in tandem with two of its investigative partners -- German news group Der Spiegel and The Insider, another news organization.
Widely recognized as Wirecard's second most powerful executive, Marsalek was heavily implicated in the missing funds. As a result of the probe, the credit card issuer's chief executive officer Markus Braun was arrested and indicted on charges of bogus accounting and financial manipulation.
According to the Bellingcat report, while airline and immigration records do create a paper trail that shows Marsalek's arrival in Manila, Philippines on June 23, the trip was a "red herring", which means that it was meant as a distraction. There was a forgery in Marsalek's immigration records. It was all a trick.
Meanwhile, Marsalek has reportedly transferred a huge amount of digital currency after his escape from Germany, a report by the German newspaper Handelsblatt, disclosed.
The bitcoin transfer suggests that Marsalek could be in Russia. As per the Handelsblatt report, he has been missing for weeks and has reportedly brought "significant sums to Russia in the form of bitcoins from Dubai," where the beleaguered German payments processor had questionable dealings, as per a translation of a Sunday evening report.
In a related development, the Philippines' central bank is looking deeper into Wirecard's global accounting fraud, with regulators now looking into possible violations of banking laws after two of the nation's biggest banks were dragged into the mess.
The search for the missing $2.1-billion money in Wirecard's financial books uncovered by German external auditors reached the Philippines in June this year upon the discovery of dubious papers that claimed Banco de Oro and Bank of the Philippine Islands held the missing funds.
