“For nearly four years, Austrian national Jan Marsalek has been living in Russia under the assumed identity of Konstantin Baiazov, the real-life Orthodox priest.”
Wirecard hit a $28 billion valuation and then failed to find €1.9 billion in June 2020. The money never existed. Its COO visited Russia more than sixty times in a decade, ran spy campaigns against the journalists who exposed the fraud, and got a German regulator to investigate the FT reporter instead of the company. Germany protected its fintech champion while a GRU agent ran the operations.