The Wirecard Op: The "PayPal" of Europe Indeed
A review of Dan McCrum's Money Men and a few questions about America's ties to it
It’s hard to run a money laundering operation without a state. It’s harder still to run a Ponzi scheme without some state acquiescence. You either need a thumbs up—or a look in the other direction.
Just ask Netanyahu’s Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Epstein, or Larry Greenfield, for that matter. Oh wait. You can’t ask them, can you? They are all dead. How convenient! But for whom?
So who, at last, did Jan Marsalek, COO of Wirecard and spy wannabe, really work for? (German intelligence says that Marsalek is in Moscow nowadays but he took a circuitous route to get there — through Syria and Libya. As one does, I suppose.)
That’s one of the underexplored questions in Financial Times reporter Dan McCrum’s rather excellent new book, Money Men: A Hot Startup, A Billion Dollar Fraud, A Fight for the Truth.
Lamentably the book isn’t as yet available in the United States so I had a colleague ship it to me from the Mother Country. Worth the extra cost in every respect.
McCrum, making the podcast rounds, has really been totally excellent in every respect and he’s sure to command the attention of British press. I hope the book crosses the pond.
Here were a bunch of Chinese- and Israeli-backed German and Austrian mobsters who conned the world with one of the largest financial scandals in European history. And you know how the Austrians and Germans are when they have financial crises!
I think it’s no exaggeration to say that the Wirecard scandal toppled both the Kurz and Merkel governments. No less a world leader than Chancellor Olaf Scholz — himself not totally immune from criticism over Wirecard — has congratulated McCrum on his work.
Now there are hints here and there. We see a Make America Great Again hat. We hear mention of Marsalek’s ties to figures wanting to move the Embassy to Jerusalem — itself a way of pressuring the Hashemites, key US allies. (If one of the three holy cities — Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem — is taken away from the Hashemites, sworn to protect them, then that has interesting regime consequences.)
We know that some of the Wirecard payment processors have connections to Israeli payment processor ICC-Cal, which itself seemingly has ties at the highest levels of Israeli society. There’s Canadian-Israeli Mossad agent and pornogaphy payment processor Nathan Jacobson, right next to two prime minsters. To read Jacobson’s history is to be blown away. Netanyahu’s Israel declined to indict him even though it admits Jacobson paid bribes.
There are the obligatory discussions about Deutsche Bank, which Wirecard implausibly sought to buy at one point. (Interestingly among PayPal’s first investors was none other than… Deutsche Bank.) We hear mention of Duterte’s Philippines, itself very much under the sway of China until the recent elections there.
Why was Marsalek so interested in Libya, a state that might one day produce oil once again? If it is true that Marsalek is a Russian asset how might we think of all the refugees being directed north? Is this the means by which the Russians have been pressuring the Europeans to acquiesce to their demands?
Who (or what) exactly was buying Wirecard’s stock every time the company was revealed to be a fraud? Might it have been a state actor? And how exactly does SoftBank — itself backed by the Japanese-Chinese-Saudi mob — play into all of this?
Let’s consider some of the cast of characters who do make a cameo and about whom we are starved for more information.
There’s Christian Angermayer who brokered a sale of Wirecard stock to SoftBank and earned $11m+ for himself.
McCrum doesn’t really go into it but Angermayer is a particularly strange character. He’s a coinvestor with Trump and J.D. Vance mega donor Rebekah Mercer in an LDS start up and he’s very bullish on bitcoin and SPACs.
One of the other people that McCrum doesn’t focus upon is Peter Thiel, the German-born American and New Zealand citizen. Thiel is, of course, a cofounder of PayPal — the very company that Wirecard patterned itself on — and he has family in Austria.
This is a strange omission given Thiel’s considerable business ties to Angermayer, Germany, Austria (and now to Sebastian Kurz, the disgraced chancellor, who now works for Thiel directly).
Thiel is also close to Ric Grenell, who also doesn’t warrant a mention (though Grenell’s ties to Marsalek did attract the attention of independent journalist Scott Stedman).
Here’s Stedman discussing the Grenell and Marsalek meeting in a February 2021 article, “US Authorities Probing Wirecard Zero-In on California Businessman.”
German outlet Capital reported that Marsalek met at least one time with then-US Ambassador to Germany, Richard ‘Ric’ Grenell. Telegram chat logs and emails obtained by the outlet show that “in mid-February 2020, [Marsalek] allegedly had a coffee meeting with the then US ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, who was appointed by Trump.”
Die Zeit, another German outlet reporting on the Wirecard scandal, obtained more contemporaneous messages from Marsalek’s telegram channel: “when a member of the supervisory board asked [Marsalek] for a phone appointment in January 2020, he had better things to do,” Die Zeit reported. “I’m having coffee with the American ambassador [at] Bayerischer Hof [a Munich hotel]. “This is Richard Grenell, Donald Trump’s envoy in Berlin.”
Chat logs from February 20, 2020, in Marsalek’s confidential Telegram channel shared with Forensic News by Stern and Capital prove that Marsalek told a senior Wirecard executive that he met Grenell. Forensic News is redacting the name of the Wirecard executive as he/she is not the focus of this investigation.
The chat log also shows that the Wirecard executive speculated that Grenell’s alleged meeting with Marsalek was somehow connected to Grenell’s appointment by President Trump to Acting Director of National Intelligence on February 19.
“As soon as he meets you he is recalled [from Ambassador to Germany]…” the senior Wirecard executive wrote, “and now [he] coordinates secret services…”
Grenell could even be spotted chatting it up with Angermayer. (Was Marsalek in the crowd?)
And here’s Angermayer said positive things about Grenell.
Angermayer is also very close with Merkel and with the Russians. (He’s a coinvestor with Rebekah Mercer and Peter Thiel in Atai Life Sciences which is supposedly normalizing acid.)
And here’s Arthur Schwartz, subpoenaed before the January 6th committee, repeating much the same talking point about Grenell as Angermayer.
Of course there’s a larger question here that we dare not look at too closely.
There’s a hint of it in the art direction of Soni’s new book on PayPal — The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley— (at least the early version).
What’s that? A fortune cookie?
Is much of fintech fake? If so, how much?
Is it possible to run an asset bubble without the Chinese participating? PayPal Mafia indeed.