Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Munich prosecutors have dropped some of the criminal charges against former Wirecard chief executive Markus Braun as they believe he is all but certain to receive a long prison sentence for the remaining charges in the case.
The prosecutors made the decision, announced in a statement by the Munich district court on Wednesday, in an effort to speed up a case that has been under way since December 2022.
Braun and two other former Wirecard managers are facing charges of having run a “criminal racket” responsible for fraud worth billions of euros.
Among the dropped charges are allegations of falsifying Wirecard’s 2015 annual results, 26 counts of market manipulation and certain cases of alleged embezzlement linked to suspicious loans to Wirecard business partners.
Braun will continue to face charges over the alleged falsification of the collapsed fintech company’s 2016 to 2018 annual results, a potentially inaccurate ad-hoc release over interim findings in a KPMG special audit, and suspicious loans to Asian business partners. He is also accused of defrauding a consortium of banks over a €1.75bn revolving credit facility.
Braun, who has been in custody since July 2022, has consistently denied any wrongdoing. He has argued he was deceived by his second-in-command, Jan Marsalek, who absconded after the collapse and is thought to be hiding in Russia.
Wirecard, once a high-flying payments company that at its peak was valued at €24bn on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, crashed into insolvency in 2020 in one of Europe’s largest accounting frauds.
One of the co-defendants in the trial has turned chief witness and given evidence against Braun.
At the start of the case, prosecutors took four hours to read out the 89-page indictment, which included charges of fraud, market and accounting manipulation and embezzlement spanning five years. Under German law, the maximum possible jail term is 15 years.
Presiding judge Markus Födisch last month suggested to prosecutors that they should streamline the indictment. He argued it would demand substantial additional time to review the evidence for the now-dropped charges but they were unlikely to make a meaningful impact on a potential sentence.
Prosecutors told the court on Wednesday that they expected “a conviction” for all the remaining offences “based on the investigation results, as well as the findings of the trial”. They added that the remaining alleged crimes were “so serious” that a “severe punishment” could still be imposed.
Before Wednesday’s development, there had been no end in sight for the trial and the court had scheduled hearings for the remainder of the year. The court told the FT on Wednesday that it was unclear how much the dropping of the charges would shorten the trial.
