Munich (Reuters) - Wirecard insolvency administrator Michael Jaffe considers the latest theories of former CEO Markus Braun regarding the payment processor's alleged third-party business in Asia to be absurd.

"The fact that real business could have been 'stolen' from Wirecard, i.e. business that was previously conducted by Wirecard itself on a significant scale, is not yet apparent, if only because there were no structures and resources with which such business could have been conducted," states Jaffe's latest status report to Wirecard's creditors, which has been available to the news agency Reuters since Thursday.

Braun's lawyer Alfred Dierlamm had recently argued in the fraud trial surrounding Wirecard's bankruptcy that the fugitive Wirecard board member Jan Marsalek and the co-defendant Asia vice president Oliver Bellenhaus had diverted the lucrative business with partners in Asia to other service providers and enriched themselves from it. He had previously accused them of diverting the proceeds from the business without his knowledge. 1.9 billion euros in commissions, which according to Wirecard's balance sheet were supposed to be held in trust accounts in Asia, turned out to be non-existent in 2020. Wirecard then had to file for insolvency.

It is not plausible how the entire business could have been diverted "without leaving even a trace in the company", Jaffe wrote to the creditors. The data had been evaluated very carefully in this respect. On the contrary, he believes - as do the prosecutors - that it never existed. There is no evidence that Wirecard ever referred merchants to third-party partners who processed the payments on its behalf. Even employees interviewed by the insolvency administration did not remember that a merchant had been referred to one of the alleged partners, according to the report.

Jaffe believes that EY's auditors are partly to blame for the fact that the years of fraud at Wirecard were not uncovered earlier. Shortly before Christmas, it became known that the insolvency administrator had therefore sued the auditors for damages. According to insiders, the amount at stake is in the billions. The task of the insolvency administrator is to recover as much money as possible for the creditors. Following the bankruptcy, they have filed claims worth billions against the former stock market star.

According to the status report, Jaffe has also sued the US investment bank Citi for 140 million euros at the Munich I Regional Court. It had carried out a share buyback for Wirecard a few months before the insolvency. However, Wirecard could no longer have afforded the buyback at that time, Jaffe argues in the lawsuit. This "constitutes a breach of stock corporation law regulations, which in turn leads to the nullity of the agreements concluded under the law of obligations," it says in its report. The bank has rejected the claims, which is why he has now filed a lawsuit to prevent the statute of limitations from running out.

The former CFO Burkhard Ley is also to repay money to the insolvency administrator, according to the status report. Jaffe is demanding 815,000 euros that Ley received from Wirecard in 2020, although his consultancy contract expired at the end of 2019. The Munich public prosecutor's office brought charges against Ley in mid-December. Among other things, it accuses him of balance sheet falsification, market manipulation, fraud and breach of trust during his time as CFO (until 2017) and later as a consultant.

(Report by Alexander Hübner, edited by Birgit Mittwollen. If you have any questions, please contact our editorial team at berlin.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for politics and the economy) or frankfurt.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for companies and markets).