Tech boss is Russian spymaster who has led cells across Europe... and is now on the run – by Hayley Dixon for The Telegraph – 07.03.25
- Michael Julien
- Mar 7
- 6 min read
Jan Marsalek, embroiled in a world of private armies, secret documents and surveillance, is now one of the most wanted men around.
When Jan Marsalek boarded a plane to Minsk, he left behind a €1.9 billion (£1.59 billion) black hole in his company’s finances and set the opening scenes of one of Germany’s biggest financial scandals.
He is now one of Europe’s most wanted men.
But on the night of June 19 2020, as the Wirecard chief operating officer handed over bags of cash for his escape from a tiny Austrian airfield, prosecutors were yet to issue an arrest warrant or disclose that all they had were suspicions about the businessman, despite years of allegations against him.
In the days and years that followed, what appeared to be an audacious financial scam has morphed into a tale of espionage worthy of a Cold War thriller.
For Marsalek was not just a businessman, or an alleged fraudster, but an individual caught up in the world of Russian private armies and the surveillance of Kremlin enemies.
During the decade he worked as a Russian asset, he was also “co-operating” with rival secret services around the world and may have been one of the “greatest assets” Western intelligence agencies had at their disposal, sources have told The Telegraph.
Details of his extraordinary double life can now be published after the ring of Bulgarian spies he is accused of running in the UK was found guilty of working for the Kremlin.
After spending 19 months in prison denying the crimes, Orlin Roussev, the ringleader, was the first to plead guilty late last year – but only after insisting Marsalek’s name be removed from the charge sheet.
Bizer Dzhambazov, his second in command, followed suit a week later and their three “minions” – Vanya Gaberova, Katrin Ivanova and Tihomir Ivanchev – who were responsible for carrying out surveillance on the ground, were all found guilty of conspiracy to spy at the Old Bailey on Friday.
Now that reporting restrictions have been lifted, The Telegraph can publish details of a year-long investigation into Marsalek’s life, covering thousands of documents, police and secret service files and interviews across Europe and the US, for the first time.
He appeared to have vanished after fleeing Germany, with some of those closest to Marsalek claiming he is dead. But it now seems all roads lead to Moscow.
The information unearthed by The Telegraph raises questions about why, as his payments processing company collapsed around him, Marsalek was allowed to walk away from a financial crime scene and into the arms of his Russian handlers.
Where is Jan Marsalek?
Some have suggested that Marsalek’s ability to flee may have been aided by his “links” to the world of espionage and the “kompromat”, or damaging information, he may have accumulated.
Criminal allegations against him date back to 2015, and British intelligence agencies are understood to be among those who, as far back as 2018, were warned about his links to Russia.
It was around this time he was found to hold top secret documents, including the formula for Novichok, the substance used to poison Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury in the same year.
Secret investigative documents seen by The Telegraph reveal that Marsalek had access to a network of spies and police in the UK, the US, Germany, Austria, Israel, Italy, Switzerland, France, Croatia, Hong Kong and Turkey, and it is understood that he was providing information to several different countries.
But British authorities and their Western counterparts may have felt he was just too valuable an asset to shut down.
Whatever the reason, the failure to arrest the businessman meant that, in the months following his escape to Belarus, he was free to assist with Russian paramilitary operations in Africa, including those involving the notorious Wagner mercenary group, and to set up the Bulgarian spy ring from Moscow.
It can now be revealed that, since 2020, he has also been involved in a secret project to supply drones from China for use in the war in Ukraine and in the selling of weapons captured by Putin’s forces on the battlefield back to the People’s Liberation Army, allowing Beijing to uncover Western military secrets.
Intelligence sources have told The Telegraph that Marsalek still travels regularly, mainly between Russia and the Middle East, and that he has been linked to both the gold trade and money laundering operations in Namibia.
While British authorities have spent years gathering evidence against and prosecuting the Bulgarians, they have been unable to find the man they say is pulling the strings behind the scenes.
When Marsalek fled Germany through Austria in June 2020, he claimed that he was travelling to the Philippines to look for the missing €1.9 billion. He even had officials in the Philippines forge immigration records to throw German pursuers off his trail.
This lie began a series of conspiracy theories, fuelling claims he is in India, Dubai or Saudi Arabia. But Western security agencies are certain he is in Russia, while the Kremlin has suggested they may want to look for him in Kazakhstan. However, his best friend is among those to have told The Telegraph that he believes he is dead.
The former tech boss has taken on a mythical status, as one Old Bailey judge discovered when Roussev’s original defence claimed that he was actually communicating with Mossad agents in Israel and spies in Serbia who had assumed Marsalek’s identity as a “joke”.
A model student – with a Communist spy for a grandfather
So how did an Austrian high school dropout go on to become chief operating officer of Wirecard – the payments processing company that was the jewel of Germany’s tech sector – and then a Russian spy at the top of Interpol’s most wanted list for a fraud amounting to billions of dollars?
Born in Vienna on March 15 1980, Marsalek was the son of a timber merchant and the grandson of Hans Marsalek, a Czech communist who was himself suspected of spying for the Russians while working as an officer for the Austrian state police.
Growing up in nearby Klosterneuburg, classmates remembered a model student with an aptitude for computers. But he dropped out just months before graduating when he was lured by the promise of a paycheck from a tech company in Bavaria.
His parents divorced when he was a teenager, and in 1999, he moved out of the family home and cut ties with his mother. She later told investigators that she has no contact with her “show off” son.
He left home the same year that Wirecard was founded in a suburb of Munich, a start-up payments processor that began life in the risky world that established banks avoided, one of pornography, gambling websites and sectors rife with both money laundering and the spoils of organised crime.
A year later, on his 20th birthday, Marsalek, with no qualifications, was hired by Wirecard for his technical knowhow, where he was given a role as director of technology on a starting salary of 9,000 Deutsche marks (around £3,000) a month.
It was a move that would open the door to an extravagant lifestyle and see him catapulted into the world of Europe’s financial and political elite.
He embraced luxury travel and profligate spending, paying €100,000 restaurant bills in cash, throwing decadent parties where sushi would be served on the bodies of naked women, and treating friends to champagne on the rooftop of Munich’s Mandarin Oriental hotel.
‘Eloquent, a rhetorical master’
A smooth-talking and charming executive who spoke three languages, Marsalek was behind the scenes of Wirecard’s meteoric rise and allegedly the massive fraud that hid the fact that this rise was a scam, insiders have told The Telegraph.
“Jan was extremely eloquent, a rhetorical master. He really was my idol in terms of communication,” says Martin Osterloh, who worked alongside Marsalek at Wirecard for 15 years. “He had this art of saying certain things in a way that you just wanted to write down.
“He had many, many occasions when he came late to a meeting, he would walk in half an hour late, even with some of our big clients, and this was very disrespectful. But when Jan walked in, it didn’t matter because he was so charming; they would forgive him instantly.”
Swagger was not unusual in the world of high-risk payments, but Marsalek would always seek to assure his colleagues that he really cared, and that in this moment, they were the most important person on his agenda.
While Wirecard was on the up, listing on the Frankfurt stock market in 2005, it was also dogged by questions about the legality of its business.
The article is 24 pages long and ends with this statement:
Despite an Interpol red notice and the high-profile dismantling of his network of agents, security agencies around the world are still unable to stop Jan Marsalek.
For the full article click on this link or click on the clink below for the pdf file:
Additional reporting Roland Oliphant, Senior Foreign Correspondent
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