The trial of three Wirecard executives has begun, seeking to understand how the €24B startup imploded in June 2020, one of the largest frauds in German history
A panel of Munich judges will from Thursday begin dissecting one of the biggest frauds in German history Tweets: @olafstorbeck , @robinwigg , @olafstorbeck , @pickardje , and @bondhack Tweets: Olaf Storbeck / @olafstorbeck : The Wirecard trial will start next week - and my trepidation is growing by the minute. Reading out 89 pages of charges alone will take some 5 hours, and the judge has scheduled 100 days in court “for now”. My curtain raiser: https://enterprise-sharing.ft.com/ ... Robin Wigglesworth / @robinwigg : Amateurs. In crypto this is kiddie league stuff. https://www.ft.com/... https://twitter.com/... Olaf Storbeck / @olafstorbeck : What was good enough for the Kaiser...... When asking people why white collar crime trials in Germany take so much longer than in the US or the UK, I learned that the key reason are procedural rules that were put in place in 1879. https://www.ft.com/... https://twitter.com/... Jim Pickard / @pickardje : 🔥 “Prosecutors expect that reading out all the charges will take about five hours.” #wirecard https://twitter.com/... Robert Smith / @bondhack : Among the many fascinating details in here: the investigation into Wirecard was initially triggered by a criminal complaint from the hedge fund manager Chris Hohn, who made a very public intervention in the months before the fraudulent company collapsed https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The road to the Munich courtroom started in June 2020, when Wirecard disclosed that €1.9B in cash was missing and imploded within days — a company once valued above $14B that claimed to process $140B in transactions a year. Former CEO Markus Braun was arrested on false-accounting and market-manipulation suspicions within a week, and FT reporting later documented the company's effort to hoodwink its auditors and even plan a takeover of Deutsche Bank in its final months.
What changed today is that accountability has moved from insolvency proceedings to criminal court: Munich judges have scheduled roughly 100 days of hearings and will read out 89 pages of charges against three executives. The case also carries an unusual origin — hedge fund manager Chris Hohn's criminal complaint is what initially triggered the investigation.
First-order effects
- Three Wirecard executives now face a multi-year-scale criminal trial in Munich, with the court's 100-day schedule signaling prosecutors intend to litigate the full anatomy of the collapse rather than a narrow charge set.
- Markus Braun, already in custody since his June 2020 arrest, sees his alleged conduct tested publicly as the trial dissects how the missing balances were presented to auditors.
Second-order effects
- A US dimension looms over the German proceedings: the DOJ's examination of Wirecard's alleged role in a $100M bank-fraud conspiracy tied to an online marijuana marketplace means any testimony in Munich feeds parallel exposure abroad.
- Auditors and the gatekeepers who signed off on Wirecard's books face renewed scrutiny as the trial reconstructs how 'spurious cash balances' were supplied by a third party — pressure that lands on the audit profession regardless of the verdict.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Germany's accounting-fraud enforcement shifts from reactive scandal response toward longer, evidence-heavy trials that treat executive accountability as a years-long process rather than an arrest headline.
- The case cements the template that activist complaints — here Chris Hohn's criminal complaint — can force state prosecution where regulators and auditors failed, raising the bar for what listed fintechs must prove about their cash.
The trend: Europe's largest corporate-fraud collapses are entering a courtroom phase, where multi-hundred-day trials — not the initial implosion — become the real test of whether audit and regulatory failures get fixed.