Sun24 News

Wirecard Sacked, Season 1: Third episode, The motions

An investigative podcast about the Wirecard scandal in Munich's Stadelheim court

Another episode of the 'Wirecard Sacked' podcast, this season 1 is about detailed insider accounts of the proceedings in Munich's Stadelheim prison courtroom that have been going on for well over a year.

This is the third episode about the Wirecard trial, more will follow every 2 to 3 days.

Contents:
The millionaire lawyer image (→ 01:30)
Hey guys, this is about the biggest financial scandal (→ 02:22)
What the defense presented there was fitting (→ 03:49)
The witnesses of the special commission (→ 04:34)
I had sent a desperate e-mail (→ 05:27)
This company in Hong Kong (→ 07:38)
This is about 340 millions (→ 08:25)
The late financial transaction data and foreign accounts (→ 09:47)
It gets even more scandalous (→ 11:07)
Were you at James Freis' interrogation? (→ 11:48)

Season 1, Episode 3

Wirecard Sacked - The Court Proceeding

00:00

Here the article to the court appearance of Wirecard interim CEO James Freis from April 2023:
The Third Man - About Wirecard's interim CEO James Freis and nice shoes

Previous
Episode 2 - Court Trial's Beginning

Next
Episode 4 - The Insolvency

Transcript 

(Music) 

Wirecard Sacked, the Sun24 News Podcast, Season 1, Episode 3. 

Jörg: But let's come back to that, there was a 300 page non-opening motion before the trial started, which nobody knows. And I don't think it just had the phone book in it. 

Martin: For people who are perhaps less familiar with legal jargon, filing a motion means that you stop the entire trial and put it on hold to examine certain facts before you continue to muddle around in the trial. I was there myself, so I can remember Dierlamm reading out his things and then getting up from his chair, pointing his finger loudly at the public prosecutor's office opposite him. And shouted loudly at three or four representatives of the public prosecutor's office and accused these public prosecutors of being the problem. Among other things, that they were responsible for things that happened here that were scandalous and that he immediately requested a stay of proceedings. So I was shocked, to put it mildly. How did you experience that? Can you still remember it? 

Jörg: I have to say, I didn't have the whole Braun defense in terms of content on my radar. That came relatively quickly in the course of the trial. But before that, when the trial started, I thought it was just bluster. Have you read the articles about Dierlamm? Dierlamm, he rumbles with might and main. It was clearly the picture that was painted of Dierlamm, the millionaire lawyer, who presented a non-existent defense out loud. And that was my position at the time. And then, bit by bit over the next few weeks, a company name came up. 

(Music) 

Jörg: The company names that came up were very decisive, because they always meant something to me, of course, and because it was very surprising for me. And I was always stunned when the Wirtschaftswoche blog said, well, lots of companies, lots of names. Or when things like, oh, now it's getting too technical, I'll spare you that now. Maybe we'll get to the technology. So I thought to myself, hey guys, this is about the largest economic process in Germany. And every detail is important here, as complex as the process is. And that led to irritation. 

Martin: Absolutely, absolutely. 

Jörg: And what was also very early on, I was sitting in Stadelheim, some follow-up appointment, in March, and was there all day. And then in the evening there were newspaper reports about this trial day. And when I read them, I thought I was somewhere else. And I think you noticed that relatively quickly too. 

Martin: Yes, I come from a different corner. I practically skipped these reports because I'm an independent journalist and have a rather critical opinion of many of my colleagues anyway, should I call them that. And I simply went into this court case in mid-December in a relatively neutral way, let's say. And then I was really shocked by the way Dierlamm presented things. So I have a good nose for it and then observe how a person's presentation fits in with the content. And what Dierlamm presented there, from the beginning of February onwards, was really incredible. It fitted. You can't act like that if you're just putting on a show, if you're just trying to blurt out something that isn't there. There really was knowledge and enthusiasm and full conviction behind it. I couldn't explain it any other way. And then it started, actually from March, when the first motions for evidence were filed. In other words, motions that Dierlamm then submitted in writing, then in documents, and also read out, many of them. Can you still remember what happened then? 

Jörg: I have to think about it for a moment. I think there was a very crucial date. I don't know if you were there. The officers from the special commission were there, at the beginning of March. 

Martin: No, unfortunately I wasn't there. 

Jörg: The amazing thing was that Dierlamm asked critical questions about the investigation. For example, this and that result of the investigation, how did it come to be in the files in such and such a way. And then there are the heads of the investigations, the special commission, who have the case of their lives on their desks, the biggest economic trial in Germany, I'll say it again. They're sitting in Stadelheim, looking and saying, I can't remember. I don't remember. You laugh, you laugh. I felt the same way. I think even Bäumler-Hösel was there that day. I think she was in court, sitting at the back in the auditorium. I'm not entirely sure, but I went out and was stunned. And my reaction, you have to think, at that point I thought, they're screwing up the conviction of Braun, this public prosecutor's office is screwing up. And what did I do? I wrote an email, a desperate email to the public prosecutor's office. I wrote, hey guys, the Dierlamm has hit sore spots, you seem totally helpless. This is going completely wrong. Can we talk again, because I was so stunned. But as I said again, I was still absolutely convinced and still think that it was clearly Dierlamm's stupidity in principle. 

Martin: I wasn't there on that day, but then, at the latest, I can still remember it very well, I also became more aware of you. I already knew you from the movie. You were also part of that Sky documentary that a lot of people know. The movie about Pav Gill came out in mid-2021. And Jörg was the protagonist, was part of that movie. You can also see him being interviewed in certain scenes as the expert who has the knowledge about Wirecard. And I remember quite clearly that your publication, which you posted on social media, about this Soko special commission interrogation, that they then brought me closer to you, which told me that he sees it similarly to me. Something gigantic must be coming. Either we're totally clouded here now and we have to somehow find our own faults or something really big will happen or come that nobody expected. 

(Music) 

Martin: And then April slowly came. So in April 2023, there was this famous motion for evidence from Dierlamm regarding a Swiss company and a Hong Kong company. They were then named in a motion for evidence. And from that day on, it was clear to me that there was a huge story to be discovered here. 

Jörg: Yes, those were the two companies that were then picked up by Bayerischer Rundfunk at some point, I can't remember the date. I can still remember this company in Hong Kong, shall we mention the name? I think it's called Pittodrie Finance. And the Swiss one is the Monte company? 

Jörg: Yes, but listen. As always, when I've heard a company name, so I've also written journalists here, written emails, company names have been mentioned today. I checked them all, even though I wasn't in court. Pittodrie for 10 euros, I think, 9 euros, I got the extract from the commercial register in Hong Kong, with a credit card, which was paid for in Hong Kong. And I look in there and there are some Swiss names in there. And then I thought, hello. And I started googling the Swiss names and thought, ey. It was very astonishing, as I always heard from Dierlamm and Braun later on. But you could have read about it straight away. It would have taken five minutes. 

Martin: Call Hong Kong and someone will say with a strong Swiss dialect in the German language: Yes, hello, Gruetzi wohl, oderr. 

Jörg: Martin, we're talking about 340 million euros. Only in this case, 340 million is more than a third of all the money that Michael Jaffe raised in his great sell-off of Wirecard. More than a third. 

Martin: And a sixth of the missing 1.9 billion. 

Jörg: Where are you coming from? 

Martin: I almost fell off my stool when I heard this motion for evidence. 

Jörg: Yes, and the exciting thing is, I mean, what is it about? Well, for me, Wirecard is not about the money. But I think the damage or the whole discussion is pretty much about money. And then there's, I don't know, what was the first number? 2 billion, I think, that Dierlamm mentioned at first, that's flying around. And I hear everywhere, I think the comment on Dierlamm's request for evidence from a journalist, I won't mention his name, was: I asked, what does it say? And the answer was the same nonsense that Dierlamm has been saying for months. So I said, hey, why nonsense? 

Martin: We have to go back to the beginning of the trial, December, January 2022, 2023. So the first dates, when Deirlamm stood up after the public prosecutor's office read out the indictment and got started. And Dierlamm said back then, in his first few days of being able to present himself, that, get this, for the very first time ever, in this entire trial, in the entire thing since mid-2020, the Munich public prosecutor's office had handed over the financial transaction data, the digital footprints of this entire Wirecard company, to the defense for the first time ever two and a half weeks before the trial began. 

Jörg: There's more, there's more. You also said at some point that you only started looking at the foreign accounts in September 2021. And then a second thing that came out later, which also completely stunned me, you looked at accounts in which the defense later found payments, I believe in the three-digit million range. You looked at these accounts and ignored these payments. What you did was round-tripping, looking for over five million. And then you overlooked 100 million, ignored it, I don't know - stunned. There's no such thing. 

Martin: What happened next was even more disastrous or scandalous for me. The public prosecutor's office refused to respond to these requests for evidence in the weeks that followed. When I heard that, I thought the public prosecutor's office would come out tomorrow and make a statement, the judge would say that the court proceedings were over, we really had to put the whole case on hold and look into things. And nothing happened. That was the first thing that happened and then something else happened. But how did you see it? 

Jörg: That's really exciting for me, because you were coming from a completely different position to me, you were much more critical of the process. I wasn't really critical back then. I just didn't understand it. I was irritated. I was highly irritated. I don't know, were you at James Fries? 

Martin: Yes, I was there. 

Jörg: I think we met there too. That was a blast in that you could read a report about the two days in the German press, where I also had an argument with a journalist from Süddeutsche Zeitung, we almost went at each other because I said, how can you present these two days of questioning in such a distorted way? And then he said, as a journalist, you have to give me the right to set priorities. You were there, there was a Dutch article that said something completely different. So that was this media issue, we'll certainly get to that. But again, I wasn't as critical as you were. It's really amazing for me to look at it again afterwards. 

Martin: You've already had the second shock. So the first shock was really that the public prosecutor's office remained relatively passive and inactive after these hammer motions for evidence, as did the court, where it was expected that the proceedings would now have to end. It's madness what was found there. So you have to imagine a public prosecutor's office refusing to access hundreds of millions of found funds in tax havens, paradises, countries with lax banking laws. To somehow search the offices of these companies. Nothing has happened, not until today, if I'm not mistaken, or maybe you know more. That was the first thing that I find completely incomprehensible. And the second thing was really, and you've just anticipated this a little, the way in which mass media reporters continued to report on this process. They practically got stuck where you had your observation in 2022, in March 2022, that a condemnation by the mass media press was already taking place at that time and that they had hardly moved on, no matter what happened in the courtroom. 

(Music)

Speaker:
Jörg - longtime Wirecard expert and investigator
Martin - Investigative lead at Sun24 News and Wirecard expert

Organization and realization:
Martin D. / Sun24 News

Wirecard Sacked

The Court Proceeding - Season 1, Episode 10 - Final

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The Court Proceeding - Season 1, Episode 9

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The Court Proceeding - Season 1, Episode 8

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The Court Proceeding - Season 1, Episode 7

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The Court Proceeding - Season 1, Episode 6

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The Court Proceeding - Season 1, Episode 5

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The Court Proceeding - Season 1, Episode 4

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The Court Proceeding - Season 1, Episode 2

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The Court Proceeding - Season 1, Episode 1

The Wirecard Summer Gap

About extorted confessions and Bavarian radio news

Money launding is not my thing

About Commerzbank and cancelled Wirecard credit lines

Wirecard Chances

About supervisory board advising lawyers

The Wirecard PR Court

About an obscure questioning of a Wirecard lawyer

Wirecard Rogue

About crazy judiciary talks and on-target court motions

Wirecard Untangled

About unsolved issues in Germany's master finance scandal

La Vie en Wirecard

About strong Spanish financial analyses and weak French allegations

All Inside The Singapore Folder

About Wirecard book keepings an email conversations

Grand Vision Trust

A Wirecard Bank Director and Relationship Managements

Mount Interim

About a Wirecard interim-CEO on a Swiss rose mountain

Harvesting Wirecard

About Swiss roses and Wirecard bears

The PayLondon Group

About bears from London and Wirecard targetings

Mount Acronis

About a Swiss IT sponsor and Wirecard entanglements

Magic Pav

About a Wirecard whistleblower and magic law firms

The Trial

About a Wirecard release of prisoner and Franz Kafka's unfinished works

The Grand Orchestra

About Wirecard's share price and dolphins against sharks

Mount Wirecard

About Swiss Wirecard entanglements and the remains of Crypto AG

Wirecard Court Halftime

About seven months in Munich Stadelheim and the miracle of Bern

Pandora's Box

About Wirecard's IT Architectures

The Third Man

About Wirecard's interim CEO James Freis and nice shoes

Deflective Attorneys

About a five hours Wirecard indictment

Bavariacard

About a Germanic Wirecard Poker

A Munich Fraud

Wirecard and Munich's Public Prosecutor's Office

Royal Courts of Wirecard

About a Wirecard Lawsuit and Quantum Physics

Brilliant Consultants

About Wirecard's financial auditors and the chess game

Back To The Wirecard

About the roots of the insolvent German payment provider

BaFin The Thirteenth

An April 13th day at the Wirecard investigational committee