Austria June 19th 2020 early evening a taxi is speeding from Vienna to vau airport usually the trip would only take 35 minutes but the taxi driver is not familiar with the route and misses the entrance to the airport the airport is Tiny there's a tower a few hangers and a restaurant a small Business Jet has been ready for takeoff since the afternoon a Sessa Citation Mustang Model 510 flight number fty 5 the only thing missing is the passenger the taxi finally gets there at 7:45 p.m. the two pilots are waiting just off the tarmac out of the car Steps A well-dressed gentleman light blue jeans white shirt black leather jacket and black sneakers he pays for the flight in cash 7,920 no receipt at 8:03 p.m. precisely the plane takes off said passenger is a man of many faces even more fake passports and close ties to foreign intelligence agencies he is involved in countless Shady deals loves to play Spy and agent and indulges in a lavish lifestyle he's also the key figure in the largest economic scandal in German history and he has been on the Run since that very evening at vau airportal Yan masal danan maral he's missing was accused of fraud Spanish Without a Trace masalik is wanted by German authorities and is believed to have fled to Russia so there is a massive fraud and Yan madic was involved in that what do we know of mik's [Music] whereabouts wirecard is founded in 1999 for a long time the company's considered Germany's answer to Silicon Valley a tech firm for online payments essentially the German PayPal but only for businesses initially the startup focuses on processing payments for pornography and gambling companies but the clientele quickly becomes more reputable over the next few years wireart experiences a meteoric rise in 2018 the company is larger than Deutsche Bank and eventually in June 2020 it collapsed it went straight from the Dax 30 to nothing Dan mccrum was the first person to uncover discrepancies in wire carts numbers he's an investigative journalist for the financial times and together with his team he put together the decisive pieces to help authorities open an official fraud investigation we've included links to mccrum's book moneymen and the wire card podcast by German media Outlet SE in the description on June 18th 10:43 a.m. Auditors from ey confirmed that wirecard failed to provide receipts for 1.9 billion worth of assets the money was supposed to be held in accounts in Asia [Music] the very next day June 19th Marcus Bron steps down as CEO a few days later June 22nd wirecard claims it is highly probable the missing 1.9 billion euros does not exist the company files for insolvency on June 25th and just like that one of Germany's Weare technology success stories has come to an in glorious end the wire card case is a complex web of clu Clues leads and rumors to keep a clear head you need a keen sense of facts and connections that's why we love brilliant brilliant is a Hands-On learning by doing platform that lets you take your critical thinking and problem solving skills to the next level or your investigative mindset to connect the dots in an intricate puzzle of lies and spies their methodology is super smart and effective fun and bite-sized interactive lessons offering you a tangible grip on complex topics from math and data analysis to programming and AI no matter where you start from brilliant matches your skill level and interests the app lets you develop powerful daily learning habits to try everything brilliant has to offer for free for full 30 days scan this QR code or visit brilliant.org Fern or click on the link in the description you'll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription by checking out brilliant you are actively supporting our Channel Marcus Brown is arrested on June 23rd he's charged with misrepresentation Market manipulation breach of trust and Commercial gang fraud amounting to billions of Euros he's not the only one wanted by the public prosecutor's office the second alleged main culprit is Austrian citizen Yan marcelik a member of The Wire card management board and largely responsible for their business in Asia a massive trial on the case has been underway since December 22 in addition to ex CEO Marcus Brown former Chief accountant Stefan funera and key witness Oliver Bellen housee are also in the dock until proven guilty they're all protected by the presumption of innocence only marel is not there when the trial starts there has been no trace of him for almost four years Marcel is released with immediate effect on the very day ey discloses the balance sheet problems June 18th 2020 Brown still asks him to travel to the Philippines to investigate the whereabouts of the missing € 1.9 billion EUR on June 23rd 2020 marcelik lands at Manila airport in the Philippines the following day he leaves SIU airport some 800 km south of the capital and travels on to China at least that's what the records from the Philippines Bureau of immigration say but something is off Yan marel can't be seen entering the country on Airport surveillance cameras also there are no flights from SIU to China on his alleged day of departure apparently immigration officers fake the data entries it's an offense they are later officially charged with so where is Marcel on the evening of June 18th the day he is released from work Mar Mar goes to a restaurant in Munich called ilano here he meets with two acquaintances from Austria the first one is Martin Weiss a former domestic intelligence agent the second one is Thomas shelin Bacher a former member of the Austrian National Council for right-wing populist party FPU marcelik tells them he urgently needs to go to the Philippines to sort out wire card's balance sheet trouble his favorite route would be via Minsk bellarus he hands them his passport so they can book him a flight the next day June 19th at 11:56 a.m. someone sends an email to the airport in Minsk the sender is an employee at Minsk based travel agency planeta gios the mail itself informs airport staff there will be a VIP guest flying in from Vienna attached as a diplomatic passport from the Caribbean state of Canada according to research conducted by German newspaper zudo the email and its attachment were later deleted by accident later that day a small Cessna with Yan Marcel on board takes off in Vienna and flies towards Belarus around 3 hours later the plan touches down in Minsk at passport control Marcel uses his real passport he is already expected at the airport and picked up by a black Mercedes minius with bellian license plates he is taken to the Hampton hotel on Tolstoy Street in Minsk some 45 km away the authorities in Minsk do not know whether marcelik ever left bellarus or where he might be by the time the public prosecutor's office starts looking for him marcelik has a head start of several days they raid one of his mansions in Munich but what what they find there only raises further questions before his escape this is where Marcel spends most of his time at Prince regeton stasa 61 aik Villa uses something like a clubhouse for himself his business associates and close confidants there is a high-end surveillance system and plans for bug proof chamber nobody ever really lived here the building was partly used as office space for example by Martin Weiss the former Austrian intell agent who helped Marcel Escape but the house is also a regular meeting hub for other Former Intelligence agents military personnel and money launderers surrounded by Italian design furniture and expensive oil paintings they mingle and talk business sometimes they also take their meetings to fancy restaurants to fos CER for business matters and to matsuhisa Munich for all things pleasure in the Villa investigators find several expensive paintings and sculptures there's even a figurine of Vladimir Putin on his desk they also find a black combat uniform apparently Marcel has been wearing that gear in PIRA in Syria in 2017 shortly after Syrian troops liberated the area from the so-called Islamic State Russia supported the Syrian forces during The Liberation looks like marcelik wanted to experience something that normal people don't venturing to an active war zone just for the sake of it when he gets there he's showing the Russian troops the gear he's bought with him he's got like this super klar helmet some sort of jacket which has a a bulletproof vest built into it and the troops say to him yeah this is some really nice stuff you've got here but if you go for a Stoll out there wearing this every sniper in the area is going to think you're the number one VIP and they're going to shoot you dead so he leaves it all in the hotel and so there's this little bit of this I mean in English we say all the gear and no idea somehow none of this really fits the image of a top level board manager in Germany and what's this V all about why was it frequented by so many suspicious people investigators start to realize that the search for marcelik will be much more challenging than they initially thought they are dealing with a man who is ready to vanish Into Thin Air at any time marcelik is alleged to have had connections to various intelligence agencies acquaintances says he likeed to surround himself with active and former agents and spies he himself seems to have been something of an amateur informant apparently according to the financial times marcelik bragged to business partners that he had the plans for Russian nerve agent novachuk that's the neurotoxin using the attacks on Russian dissidents Sergey scripal and Alexa noal there are also leaked chat messages of him bragging about his contacts with the American CIA and the Israeli Massad several leaked text messages suggest that he worked as an undercover informant for Austrian right-wing populist party FPU there are hints that marcelik also worked as an informant for the Austrian domestic intelligence agency under Martin Weiss the financial times reported Ed that he was planning to recruit his own Squad of mercenary soldiers in Libya the Austrian Ministry of Defense has in part confirmed this marcelik had already been using numerous aliases during his time at wirecard he logged into video calls as John Smith during his Escape he texted confidants as Richard deasi and Kim gsmi but Marcel has many other identities these two pictures have been issued by the German Federal Criminal police office bka europool and interpole to track him down I've actually got his uh poster behind me there's the wanted poster which I think you can still see on train stations and the like in Germany but do you know about this one or this one Yan marel has passports for many of his fake identities he is said to have left Belarus under the name Max Mau when he made his Escape I think seven was the number that I heard as well as having a diplomatic passport potentially from a country in the Caribbean and that kind of fits with a picture of him as well you know he was comfort ly multilingual went to the French School in Vienna um had a Czech father spoke English perfectly Marcel has been traveling quite a lot with his passports since 2010 he repeatedly traveled to Singapore and Dubai where wireart had Branch offices he has also been to Budapest Paris Vienna London Mumbai nce and Moscow Marcel is believed to have been to Russia over 60 times since 2010 there are some instances where he sort of flies in one day and almost immed immedately flies out again so he's clearly meeting people at the airport or close by and that's a kind of odd thing to do in September 2020 shortly after his spectacular escape from Germany Marcel likely assumed the identity of an orthodox Russian priest German and Austrian news outlets later got a hold of this passport copy issued in the name of Constantine bazov there really is a priest with that same name in the Russian city of leet southeast of Moscow he there's a striking resemblance to The Bold and bearded Marcel their dates of birth are only a year apart Marcel must have assumed bov's identity on paper so he could go underground and travel in 2022 another document leaked it shows yet another fake passport issued in the name of German banov both documents offer a new and interesting lead to Marcel X's latest whereabouts and [Music] identity Moscow an Audi A8 pulls up there's a man in the back seat sporting a red jacket a shaved head and a full beard he has just returned from his winter vacation in Sochi the car is closely followed by a Toyota Land Cruiser carrying his bodyguards from the Secret Service they're on their way to laar a fancy restaurant in Moscow frequented by the likes of Vladimir Putin the place is particularly famous for its fish oysters Lobster caviar all freshly caught after lunch they returned to the heavily guarded community of May andorf Gardens located in rasori one of Russ pricest residential areas here Yan marcelik resides in a stylish Villa just like he used to do in Munich it's where the super rich have their mansions and the Kremlin hosts its guests Putin's estate is just around the corner it looks like someone has changed cities and identities but kept his lifestyle the SC observes this is the new life of Y Marcel well probably we have to understand of course there is sort of mystery layered on mystery here and so maybe everything that we hear or is reported isn't the complete truth the details about Marc's New Life are largely drawn from Russian sources time and again photos appear that are supposed to show him in his car or in some Posh Restaurant the information is often impossible to verify independently however German legal authorities and officials worldwide are now certain that marcelik has indeed disappeared to Moscow and that he's been living there for the last 3 years in 2021 Moscow actually reached out to the German Federal intelligence service BND saying they wanted to talk so there was a moment where when a meeting was offered by some part of the Russian Secret Service to their German equivalents would you like to come and meet Yan marle talk to him find out what was going on and they turned him down I think because they realized if there was photographs or videos taken of German secret agents secretly meeting yam marle the bad guy who's disappeared that would just fuel a lot of conspiracy theory and you know would raise more questions so they turned that down as of today the German government has not provided any information on this particular event in December 2023 a report by The Wall Street Journal shed new light on the case all the Intel collected by authorities worldwide seems to point to one conclusion y marleik has indeed been a Russian spy for almost 10 years research conducted by Bell andcat indicates that he has been traveling to Moscow more and more frequently from 2014 on investig believe that he has provided Moscow with sensitive information on wire card customers including the B and and the bka the bka is said to have used wire card service to process almost a third of its payments to undercover agents having access to those transfer data would allow you to indirectly trace the identity and whereabouts of German Intelligence Officers marlec is also said to have supported the Russian paramilitary Wagner group he's believed to have illegally moved money for Russian spies to finance secret operations this includes a group of bulgarians who are said to have spied for Russia in the UK after Dan mccrum first reported on Financial regularities in wireart Singapore side of business in 2019 there were clear attempts to intimidate him he and other journalists were observed and their cell phones tapped mccrum suspects these schemes may have involved the Bulgarian gangsters and so one of these guys is alleged to have essentially run a company that helped you hack phones and and he helped yam marel pretty sure at about the time he was trying to hack my phone and work out what I was doing hack people's phones find out their locations steal their contacts that sort of thing the UK's Crown prosecution service accuses Marcel of giving orders to this group between 2020 and 2023 the group appears to have gathered Intel to assist the Kremlin in kidnapping Russian targets all this is substantiated by new evidence in Spring 2024 German news Outlet there Spiegel reports that British and Austrian prosecutors got their hands on thousands of telegram messages between marel the bulgarians and other contacts according to the reports one of those handymen was austo a a former Austrian intelligence officer arrested earlier this year apparently Marcel instructed him to look up classified information on Kremlin enemies and filter the data to Russia but it doesn't stop there in 2022 marel seems to have personally ensured the Contraband of highly sensitive deves from Vienna to Moscow cell phones of former high-ranking Austrian politicians and a top secret sinina laptop sinina stands for secure inter Network architecture a crypto technology co-developed by German security Personnel authorities and organizations worldwide uses technology to handle highly sensitive data in one of his texts Marcel confirms the laptop has safely reached the Russian Secret Service FSB he also writes that Russian handyman paid €20,000 in cash for it was marcelik a much better spy than people thought much more professional and experienced media reports from March 2024 claim his former girlfriend Natalia slina recruited him as early as 2014 experts on the case think the Russian X model introduced Marcel to Russian businessmen and undercover agent handlers mccrum suspects in return for all these Espionage activities Russia must have helped Marcel Escape I think if you're a country like Russia you kind of have to advertise that you look after your guys don't you you can't leave them out in the cold or throw them to the Wolves because why would people then work for you in the future if convicted in Germany marcelik faces up to 14 years in prison for financial fraud that doesn't even include the alleged leaking of State Secrets but to put him away prosecutors would first have to get their hands on him the only tangible sign of life from marcelik himself is an eight-page letter that reached German judicial authorities in July 2023 in that letter Marcel claims he is innocent he says he has never been the perpetrator but the victim of a major scheme according to him the real Mastermind is Oliver Bellen house wire card's former Dubai manager who had turned himself in to become the prosecution's crown witness on the case the letter does not say anything about the whereabouts of Marcel himself or the missing € 1.9 billion the court has deemed the letter practically useless in this case but its mere existence does prove something Marcel's lawyer Frank 16 is in touch with his client according to the Wall Street Journal Marcle could currently be in Dubai reporters believe that following the death of prosan marle may be helping to rebuild the Wagner group in Africa the hunt for one of the World's Most Wanted men continues apart from the new developments we have seen authorities are still in the dark the wire car trial has been extended by almost a year