Fugitive Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek wasn’t just responsible for Germany’s largest financial fraud in history. He was also a decade-long Russian spy. This is a joint investigation with Der Spiegel, ZDF, and Der Standard.
The never-before-told story of how the Austrian-born “whiz kid” was recruited to Russia’s largest and most notorious spy agency, the GRU, bears all the hallmarks of a genre-bending ham thriller. Sacha Baron Cohen as Bernie Madoff the Bond villain. It is a saga replete with honey traps, MiG fighter jets, erotic models, sinister ex-spooks, even more sinister mercenaries, counterfeit passports, fake priests taking Syphilis tests, and cheap disguises.