Ben Taub unwinds the collapse of Wirecard, a fintech company that operated with dirty money and had ties to the Russian state.
This was not the only defensive action that Marsalek took. Wirecard signed an agreement with Arcanum Global Intelligence, a strategic-intelligence firm whose leadership is made up of former senior British, American, French, and Israeli intelligence and military leaders. Representatives for Arcanum insist that the firm’s work for Wirecard consisted only of an internal investigation into Pav Gill’s leak of confidential information from the Singapore branch.
Wirecard treated every short seller as an existential threat. In 2016, Marsalek had approached Nick Gold, another of Gary Kilbey’s contacts in the London spread-betting scene, and offered him three million pounds to persuade a rich friend to stop shorting Wirecard. Gold declined; he found Marsalek boring, he said, and thought that the way he held his cup of coffee suggested that he was “a loser.” Only a crooked company, Gold said, would send a senior executive to hunt down its critics.
Like Marsalek, El Obeidi wore high-end Italian clothing brands, and he moved with ease through the strange world of former military and intelligence officers. He was apparently a major Wirecard investor, and a regular visitor to Marsalek’s secret mansion near the Russian consulate in Munich. To protect his financial interests, El Obeidi had come to London to run an intelligence operation of his own.
That summer, a mutual acquaintance of El Obeidi and Gold’s, a soccer agent named Saif Rubie, casually bumped into Gold at a party in Cannes. Gold, as he recalls, was “dancing on tables and being a lunatic, as I am—having a great time” when Rubie approached him and said that he was working for a group of foreign investors who were looking to invest billions. Gold invited Rubie to bring the investors to his office in London the following week.
Murphy immediately texted Gold and told him that he had been recorded. “Paul, you’re a brilliant reporter, but you’ve just done something really dumb,” Lionel Barber, the editor of the, told Murphy. Murphy offered Barber a full audit of his finances. But it wasn’t enough; the reputation of the paper was on the line. For four years, “I had told the compliance people, the lawyers, ‘Get lost, we’re doing this story,’ ” Barber told me. “But when this came up I had to do something.
One day, Jon called Gold’s housekeeper from a burner phone. He said that he was a police officer, and needed Gold to call him about an ongoing investigation. Gold called him back almost immediately. “They’re doing a huge surveillance operation on you,” Jon told him. “I think you’re going to get fucked over here, royally.”
Now Murphy reached out to Elvins, the former MI5 officer who was running El Obeidi’s operation on the ground. “I tried to flip her,” he told me. “Unfortunately, I did it at about eleven o’clock at night, and I’d had a couple of drinks.” He texted Elvins that he could “obv see the damage to your firm we are about to do,” and added, “Work with me and I promise we won’t fuck you over.” Her reply came in the form of a complaint from her lawyers.
It also appeared as if operatives were collecting detailed information on Nick Gold’s trades; in the next few months, all his leveraged bets were liquidated, with losses into the tens of millions of pounds. “My name was tarnished. Banks were now shutting me off, overnight,” Gold recalled. “My wife left me.”
In Germany, there was a raft of resignations and firings: Felix Hufeld, the head of BaFin; the head of Germany’s audit regulator; several leading Wirecard analysts at other European banks. A German parliamentary inquiry held a hundred witness hearings and reviewed nearly four hundred thousand pages of documents, concluding that the behavior of Wirecard and its enablers was “the largest financial scandal in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Marsalek was also dabbling in political affairs. A major issue in the lead-up to Austria’s 2017 elections was migration from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. Marsalek—who was connected to members of Austria’s far right—started developing plans to assemble a fifteen-thousand-man militia in southern Libya, to prevent migrants from reaching Mediterranean shores.
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