VIENNA (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 20th July, 2020) The Austrian Ministry of the Interior is collecting information into Jan Marsalek, the former chief operating officer of fallen German fintech giant Wirecard gone missing amid a fraud scandal last month, a ministry spokesperson told Sputnik on Monday.
This past Saturday, Germany's Spiegel newspaper reported that Marsalek, a national of Austria, crossed into Belarus on a chartered flight from Estonia and then into Russia.
"We are collecting information at the moment and will report the findings once we are done. Until then, I cannot give you more detail on the matter," the spokesperson said.
Another German newspaper, Handelsblatt, reported, citing business and official sources, that Marsalek was flown to Russia "under control" of special services and was currently somewhere near Moscow. According to the report, the ex-financier transferred a large sum of money in bitcoins withdrawn from Dubai, where Wirecard allegedly used to carry out questionable transactions.
Earlier in the day, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the Kremlin was not in possession of any information about Marsalek's alleged arrival in Russia.
The scandal around Wirecard broke out in Germany in June, when the company called back its yearly report for 2019 after auditors found its balance sheet was missing about 1.9 billion Euros ($2.2 billion). The firm's former chief executive Markus Braun later admitted it did not exist. He was briefly arrested and freed on bail.
