We tried to keep up with the FT's Dan McCrum when he was bulldogging the Wirecard story but eventually ended up posting headlines like "Dan McCrum Did Not Call The Germans Jackbooted Thugs" just to have something to wrap around his articles. That one covered many of them up to March 2019* and I'm sure we missed some. And there were more to come in the weeks and months ahead.
And today's story from Der Spiegel, March 5 [15 names in the byline]:
....MUCH MOREIt’s the middle of summer in Nice, and the Mediterranean is lapping gently against the walls of the quay. A man with shortly trimmed dark hair in a black suit and a radiant white shirt is striding briskly toward a cutter. A second man is carrying his case. An attractive woman – tall and blond, her summer dress fluttering in the wind – is pacing on the aft deck of the Poseidon III, laughing nervously. Her name is Natalya Zlobina, and she is the Russian lover of Jan Marsalek, one of the most-wanted men in Europe.
The scene, recorded by a camera at the Port of Nice, becomes a bit blurry. The man in the black suit climbs down a ladder to the Poseidon III and greets the woman with a kiss. She laughs; he seems annoyed. Now, it's possible to recognize his face, well-known these days from the wanted posters plastered on the walls of train stations and airports: It is Jan Marsalek himself, the former COO of Wirecard, which was once listed on Germany’s blue-chip stock index, the DAX. He has been on the run since June 2020.
The moment hardly lasts a minute, and it can be seen in the video that the woman quickly makes it clear to him that the cutter is just part of a little prank. The real ship is rocking in the waves one slip over – a luxurious mega-yacht, of course, where a group of laughing men is waiting. Later, Zlobina will celebrate her 30th birthday here. It is July 6, 2014, the day on which Jan Marsalek’s life will change. The day on which he will meet a man with excellent ties to the Russian military secret service agency GRU, and on which he will apparently begin his second life as a spy.
Marsalek’s story has thus far been more of a financial thriller, already an almost unbelievable tale of fraud, lies and deception. A story of a school dropout rising to become the COO of the financial company Wirecard, a firm considered for a time as one of the most powerful newcomers to the German economy in decades, courted by government ministers and premiers. But Wirecard’s success, as would become clear, was a sham. Billions of euros in account balances evaporated, almost 6,000 people lost their jobs and top executives were arrested.
The drama is now taking a bizarre turn, the plot gets even crazier. Suddenly, the financial thriller has become a spy thriller. And the main character is no longer a charismatic trickster, but a villain straight out of a James Bond movie, cynical and dangerous. A man who is still on the run today. But where is he? And how has he managed to escape the authorities all this time?
Joint reporting by DER SPIEGEL, German public broadcaster ZDF, the Austrian newspaper Der Standard and the Russian investigative platform The Insider has now found some answers. On the basis of confidential documents, mobile phone data, travel records, lab results, investigation files, emails and chats, Marsalek’s story can now be told in its entirety. Marsalek isn’t just the main character in one of Germany’s largest ever financial scandals. He is also – so it would seem from interviews with secret service agents, police investigators and people from his orbit – a spy working for the Kremlin. A man whose activities in his role as an agent endangers lives. Marsalek has apparently commissioned Bulgarian accomplices to track Moscow’s critics across all of Europe, spy on them and possibly even eliminate them. The plot was uncovered at the last moment by the British domestic intelligence agency MI5.
Marsalek’s ties to Russian secret service agencies go back an entire decade. It seems that he was initially recruited by the GRU, but he is also thought to have worked for the KGB’s successor agency, the FSB, in recent years. Zlobina, his girlfriend, is also in touch with men from the security services. Over the several years Marsalek spent as the head of a DAX-listed company, he was apparently able to quietly expand his spying network, traveling to Russia on more than 60 occasions and using six Austrian passports and a diplomatic document to do so.
There are plenty of indications that Marsalek also involved Wirecard in Russian intelligence activities – that money was laundered and mercenaries were paid through the company. Was Marsalek using Germany’s model company to help an adversarial power? Did a DAX-listed company assist in the waging of war? How did all this take place without German intelligence officials taking notice?
Jan Marsalek’s tracks lead into a shrill parallel world that feels at times like a poorly lit B movie. At others, it slips into the horror genre. It includes scenes with flights in MiG fighter jets and rocket-propelled grenades are fired in Syria. And others with champagne parties on the Côte d’Azur and mercenary armies are recruited in Libya. Characters include agents, nude models, mercenaries, politicians, psychopaths and murderers.
And a Russian priest who has astounding similarities to Jan Marsalek.
THE PRIEST
Halfway between Moscow and Rostov-on-Don lies the city of Lipetsk. Founded in the early 18th century by Peter the Great, it is home to half a million residents today. At a traffic circle on the way into the center of town is a charming, 200-year-old chapel with a golden dome and a façade colored brightly in yellow, blue and white. Twice a day except for Tuesdays, a priest named Konstantin Bayazov holds services there. He has a dark beard and shortly trimmed hair. If you watch the priest during his services, you start seeing similarities to Marsalek, and the two men’s birthdays are also just a single year apart. The parallels were also apparently noticed by Russian secret service agents.Bayazov – the real Bayazov – hasn’t used his own passport since September 2020. Because since then, there has been a second Bayazov, a fake one. The passport file was changed on September 5, 2020, and a new passport was issued with the number 763391844. Both the file and the travel document now include the scowling image of Jan Marsalek....
*If interested see also:
Duuude, This Paul Murphy Fellow Is Taking No Prisoners
Free Dan McCrum
But first, who is Dan McCrum?
Sometimes there's a man... I won't say a hero, 'cause, what's a hero?
But sometimes, there's a man.
And I'm talkin' about the Dude here.
Sometimes, there's a man, well, he's the man for his time and place. He
fits right in there.
Sometimes there's a man, sometimes, there's a man. Well, I lost my train
of thought here.
But... aw, hell. I've done introduced it enough.
Where to begin?
