However, the Ashley's knot probably pales in comparison to the entanglements in Germany's major financial scandal surrounding the Wirecard collapse from mid-2020, making the Wirecard knot probably the most complex ever to have reached the surface of this planet.

First of all, there are the Bavarian state authorities. They have been sailing through the Wirecard oceans since the beginning of the trial in an often ignorant and sometimes even cognitively dissonant manner - as if in an echo chamber. More or less all of the defense's motions have been shockingly sunk into the depths of the ocean, including several not entirely unjustified motions to suspend the proceedings and to at least reduce, if not terminate, the prison sentence of former CEO Dr. Markus Braun.

It is not particularly helpful that the presiding judge in the Wirecard case was himself employed as a public prosecutor still a few years ago under none other than Hildegard Bäumler-Hösl, the Bavarian public prosecutor responsible for Wirecard matters for many years. The therefore obvious, now 16-month-long state of a clear judicial bias is regularly scrubbed and rinsed from the deck by order of distant Bavarian admirals. Even allegations of bias against judges and substitute judges acting in the background regularly end up deep below deck and torched a few months later, maybe.

The public prosecutor's office in Munich is also constantly bonding the most complicated connections on the Wirecard deck. The merry tying of complicated knots began more than 10 years ago, when an unofficial, yet all too obvious non-prosecution agreement was reached with Wirecard. This was not at all incomprehensible, given the huge waves of the past digital revolution and the many German business strategists, most of whom snoring soundly in some corner of the ship. From 2020 on, Munich's public prosecutor's office was threatened by the increasing quality and quantity of information from the Financial Times, reporting about the problems of the Wirecard fleet. Distant ships could clearly see the panic from afar with binoculars, especially among the public prosecutors.

About nine months after the still quite inexplicable sinking of the entire (!) Wirecard fleet within a few days, the key Wirecard employee Andrea Görres had a rather one-sided TPA Reality Check sketched up by the impulse of Munich's public prosecutor's office. With this document, the onlookers standing on the shore could be highly clouded in an oceanic fata-morgana already long before the proceedings began, most of those involved actually seriously believed that the third-party business at Wirecard never really existed at all.


In 2020, the public prosecutor's office and the Munich judiciary, under the influence of the largely self-orchestrated Wirecard zeitgeist, also set up their charges in such a way that even the one or other experienced sailing professional or deep-sea researcher approaching Munich's public prosecutors can, indeed must, be immediately thrown overboard. This with the explanation that any further scandalous facts approaching the core, actually requiring urgent consideration, do not go along with the Procrustean bed charges brought by Munich's public prosecutors, and therefore unfortunately cannot be investigated any further.

Fleet Admiral Dr. Markus Braun, who explicitly volunteered to investigate the scandal and turned himself in, must have been a very crooked fellow instead, as is his fugitive adjutant Jan Marsalek. The pirate-like Oliver Bellenhaus, who was somehow halfway connected to the Wirecard fleet with many deleted servers overseas, was declared "Crown Pirate" by the order of Munich's judicial system and Bavarian Bilder-Berg generals who had never been to sea. This because he had provided the prosecutors with totally "reliable information". So much so that Bellenhaus was released from prison in early February 2024, exactly halfway through the expected prison sentence for the pirate from Dubai - which had not even been pronounced in the Stadelheim courtroom yet.



In order to lay the ropes all the way to Karlsruhe, a Munich judge was tied firmly to the Bavarian capital and allowed to swim all the way to Germany's Federal Court of Justice. There, from mid-2024 on, she will be allowed to sink legal appeals with heavy cannon fire from the judicial island of Karlsruhe. In fact, those that have already vanished into thin air in many battered investor's boats while trying to dock in Munich.

In a scrupulous manner, the entangled lieutenants of Munich's public prosecutor's office handed over the many spicy digital financial transaction data of the entire Wirecard fleet no less than three and a half weeks before the start of the trial in December 2023. A few months later, it was discovered that around 900 million euros of the allegedly missing 1.9 billion are actually in some pirate tax havens. Which, of course, must never reach the onlookers on the shore or the ears of the many defrauded investors. Thus, the mass media press is instructed in a Bavarian-justice-tied knot to ignore these allocated money bags in various pirate hideouts. Instead, they are high-level ordered to constantly reinforce the now collapsed narrative of an allegedly entirely missing Wirecard third-party partner business, as well as the one against the oh-so-evil fleet admiral Dr. Braun.

Some radical feminist pirates at the Munich public prosecutor's office as well as the money admiral and insolvency administrator Jaffe must also do everything in their power to ignore the mysterious funds, as if they had never been located in the first place. Otherwise, the one or other mountain-clinging admiral from Bavaria or Berlin, as well as certain mass media sharks, could eventually be held legally liable.

The mysterious 900 million euros or so that have been allocated in the meantime have of course also tarnished the reputation of the one or other marinated political officer from the 2021 German Bundestag Wirecard Committee. So much so that the author of this article, who is one of the very few journalists who continue to regularly listen to the knotty pirate theater in the Munich-Stadelheim prison courtroom, has been and continues to be personally maliciously slandered also on social media by former federal investigators of the Wirecard scandal as, quote, "acting on behalf of Dr. Braun" and "paid by him".

Indeed, words cannot adequately describe what goes on in the courtroom. Defense attorneys have to shout because motions are sometimes turned down in a highly demagogic manner, representatives of the public prosecutor's office interrupt the statements of the defense and shout back into the court microphone. The presiding judge shouts at experienced bank bosses, because his responses do not fit well into the judiciary template of Munich's public prosecutors. The tiniest, rather unimportant details are elaborated on for hours, while bombshell statements are cleverly suppressed by a judicial change of course, thus elegantly avoiding further illuminations. A justified request to exclude the public from the presentation of an autism expert was turned down so that the mass media representatives, suddenly appointed by Munich's judiciary after months of absence, could make live comments about the former finance director von Erffa directly from the courtroom. The ministers of justice of Berlin and Bavaria are spouting the usual phrases that "the German courts act independently", hence unwilling and unable to intervene in any way.

It fits in that way that the many witnesses heard in court repeatedly tell very different accounts of what happened at Wirecard than they allegedly provided prosecutors and criminal investigators a few years ago. The written statements typed on paper by the prosecutors about three years ago, under the mostly confusing bombardment of the mass media back then, are very often in stark contradiction to the statements made in front of the judges a few years later.

Wirecard's structure is mega-complex, encompassing the entire corporate and legal sphere, from simple accountants to the chairman of the supervisory board, from the janitor to the head of the Wirecard bank, on several levels and at several hotspots, entangled with various former partner companies and major investors. From Munich to Singapore to Japan, from India and Mauritius to Brazil and back again. In addition, there are political entanglements and huge knots with various intelligence organisations. Those who are not particularly well trained in the exercise and evaluation of hard-core reality usually sink hopelessly after a short time. Mass media journalists sitting in the front row of the court's press section often close their laptops at lunchtime. The article for the respective day is already finshed for publication even though the court witnesses don't really get going until after lunch. It is therefore not uncommon for mass media reports to backfire quickly on social media.

The core of such revelations of most mass media behavior is obvious. It is not the more than justified criticism of the Wirecard community on the Internet, whose existence is still completely unknown to many people in Germany, some of which is slandered in a paid hit job manner, by the way. The orgins rather lie in the statements of the first mass media reports about Wirecard. There, it was made clear to the masses that Wirecard was an electronic payment provider that had processed credit cards. A few pictures superficially clarified the role of the third-party partners, but that was all, the behavior of Braun and Marsalek was sounded on with a loud ship's horn for years.

Nowhere has it been explained to a pretty receptive and rather well-educated public that credit card payments have long been processed exclusively via software interfaces. Obtaining a license from Mastercard or Visa no longer means framing a document and proudly displaying it in one's office, but rather receiving a digital access code to dock onto one or more credit card computer servers, this under certain conditions. In essence, Wirecard made it possible for a payment to be made to a merchant's bank account within seconds of a physical credit card being swiped at the merchant desk or a credit card number being entered online. Regular banks had not been able to do this for years and initially resisted such rapid transaction processing. Understanding Wirecard's core therefore means shedding light on the complicated software architectures. This has been almost completely neglected until today. It is where the core of suspected money laundering, possibly even massive money generation out of thin air, could eventually be found. And it is probably also one of the reasons why mass media court observers explain to their readers in a rather strange way that they are "taking a break now because Oliver Bellenhaus is currently discussing technical details in court".

In the meantime, some scandalous facts have become known about the Wirecard whistleblower Pav Gill, and also about FT journalist Dan McCrum. These are also either ridiculed or entirely ignored, such reality is not allowed to even come close to be real. Instead of concentrating on a long-known, scandalous procedure in London regarding EMIF, dubious facts involving Jan Marsalek and Bulgarian secret service agents, probably tied up in a Western knot, are being spread via a speech bag. All while past relations with Russia that were once joyfully promoted before the Ukraine war, especially in and through Austria, are now being condemned eternally and generally pushed into the criminal corner. The Wirecard scandal has never been solved, and much is being done deliberately to ensure that it may never be solved ever in the future either. Judicial officials and law firms are trapped in their all-too-frequent perceptions and the still widespread, rather naive view that "true justice" will be the outcome of the Stadelheim trial.

The opposite is to be expected. Judiciary-mass-media-knotted actors are already preparing everything so that the final verdicts in the Wirecard trial will be swallowed by a broad public without grumbling. The only way to prevent this is to immediately set up a civilian council of reasonably competent experts and investigators to counter the machinations of the Bavarian Wirecard judiciary. Munich will do everything in its power to prevent exactly this from happening. It will also censor this article, continue to portray it and the author as insane in a thoroughly delusional manner, and deny reality. With decorated arrogance, still 100 years after the surrender and hasty escape of the German Kaiser, they will continue to cling to an already long imploded and increasingly delusional pyramidal order that continues to execute its self-declared right to proclaim gross injustices millions of people have no other choice than to swallow.


It was North German sailors who, a good 100 years ago, broke the pyramid-like Ashley knots of the Wilhelmine Empire and tied them up in a clean and anew way. The Wirecard scandal has all the ingredients for revolution. If only the Germans want to hear it - and are allowed to.