The identity belongs to an Orthodox priest in Lipetsk, a Russian industrial city south of Moscow. The man allegedly using it is someone else entirely. According to a joint investigation by PBS Frontline, The Insider, Der Spiegel and ZDF, Jan Marsalek, the former chief operating officer of Wirecard, has been living in Russia under the name Konstantin Baiazov after the Munich payments company collapsed in June 2020 with a €1.9 billion hole in its accounts.
He is wanted by Interpol. He is wanted by Germany’s BKA. He has become the fugitive face of the Wirecard scandal, the executive who vanished while prosecutors, regulators and investors were still trying to understand how one of Germany’s national fintech champions had fallen apart. Six years later, investigative reporters and prosecutors in London have placed him at the center of a darker allegation: that from Russia, he helped direct agents across Europe on behalf of Russian intelligence.
The second man, vanished
Marsalek was the operator. Markus Braun, the CEO, was the public face: turtleneck, Steve Jobs cosplay, keynote speeches about the cashless future. Marsalek ran the deals nobody asked about: the third-party acquirers in Dubai, Singapore and Manila, the trustee accounts in the Philippines that supposedly held more than €1.9 billion, the customer relationships that KPMG’s special audit could neither verify nor disprove.
On 18 June 2020, EY refused to sign off on Wirecard’s annual accounts. On 22 June, the management board admitted that the €1.9 billion in question probably did not exist. On 23 June, Marsalek was suspended. By 25 June, he was on a private jet from Bad Vöslau airfield in Austria to Minsk. From Minsk, he disappeared.
Braun was arrested. He denies wrongdoing, has consistently maintained he was deceived by Marsalek and others, and is currently on trial in Munich. Marsalek has never publicly responded to any of the allegations against him.
The priest identity
The Father Konstantin identity is one of several reported aliases. The Frontline team, working with reporters from The Insider and Der Spiegel, pieced together a Russian life that included a dacha outside Moscow, regular travel under fake passports, and protection linked in the reporting to Russia’s military intelligence world. Radio Free Europe reported that Marsalek had been working for Russian intelligence for years before Wirecard collapsed, not as a panicked recruit after the fact but as a long-running asset whose corporate position made him useful in ways a standard illegal could never replicate.
What he allegedly provided: payment data, the movement of sanctioned money through Wirecard’s payment rails, and access to European political and business contacts cultivated through the company’s Munich headquarters. The full scope has not been publicly disclosed by any prosecuting authority. The pattern described by investigators, however, is consistent with a long-form recruitment.
The minions
The most concrete public evidence of what Marsalek is accused of doing from Russia surfaced in a London courtroom. In March 2025, an Old Bailey jury convicted three Bulgarian nationals of spying for Russia, while three other members of the same cell had already pleaded guilty. Prosecutors told the court the cell took its instructions from Marsalek, who was alleged to have acted as a link between Russian intelligence and the spy ring.
Silicon Canals’ full visual investigation traces Marsalek’s path from Wirecard’s collapse to his alleged emergence as a Russian intelligence operative.
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The defendants had been paid hundreds of thousands of euros routed through accounts Marsalek controlled, according to prosecutors. One of them, Orlin Roussev, kept the operation running from a former guesthouse in Great Yarmouth. Another tailed Christo Grozev, the Bellingcat investigator who helped identify the Novichok team that poisoned Sergei Skripal. A third planned a honeytrap operation against a journalist in Vienna.
The cell’s targets read like a tour of Russian intelligence priorities of the past five years: Bulgarian investigative reporters, Kazakh dissidents, and the Patch Barracks US base in Stuttgart, where Ukrainian soldiers were being trained. Marsalek, according to evidence presented to the jury, was the project manager.
How a fintech COO became a handler
The path from Munich to Moscow did not begin in 2020. The Financial Times reported that Marsalek had been showing visitors to his Munich villa what he claimed was the chemical formula for Novichok, the nerve agent used on Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018. He boasted about Russian contacts. He travelled to Syria with a private security entrepreneur and proposed building a 15,000-man militia to secure the country’s southern border. He met with Austrian far-right politicians whose party signed a cooperation agreement with Vladimir Putin’s United Russia.
None of this was secret in the way intelligence work is supposed to be secret. It was hidden in plain sight, dismissed by colleagues as eccentricity, ignored by regulators who were busy investigating the journalists who kept asking questions about Wirecard’s accounts. Silicon Canals has examined how Dan McCrum’s five-year investigation at the Financial Times was met not with regulatory support but with a BaFin short-selling ban and a criminal complaint filed against the reporter himself.
While McCrum was being investigated for market manipulation, Marsalek was allegedly building contacts that later put him at the center of a European espionage case.
The escape
The 25 June 2020 flight is now well documented. Marsalek travelled by car from Munich to Bad Vöslau, a small airfield outside Vienna. From there he boarded a chartered Cessna Citation to Minsk. The flight plan was filed and paid for. Belarusian border control was, according to subsequent reporting, expecting him.
From Minsk, he is believed to have travelled overland into Russia. By the time German prosecutors issued a European arrest warrant, he was already inside a country with no extradition treaty and an active interest in keeping him there. The BKA’s wanted notice still lists him, with the same photograph that has been used since 2020 and a reward for information leading to his arrest.
The Munich trial of Markus Braun and two other former Wirecard executives has, in his absence, become a trial about him. Marsalek’s lawyer was summoned to testify after Marsalek himself contacted the court through written communication, the contents of which neither the lawyer nor the court has disclosed.
What the money actually bought
Wirecard was valued at €24 billion at its 2018 peak, more than Deutsche Bank. Its profits, according to the EY conclusion that finally killed it, had been largely fictional for most of its history as a public company. The interesting question, the one prosecutors in multiple countries are still working through, is what the fraud was actually for.
The standard answer is enrichment: executives skimming, hiding losses, propping up a share price for personal gain. The Marsalek file complicates that. According to the joint investigation, Marsalek had been a Russian asset for roughly a decade, which means the fraud overlapped almost entirely with his alleged intelligence work. A payment processor with global reach is a useful thing to control if you are trying to move money for sanctioned entities, run agents, or simply understand what flows across Europe’s commercial infrastructure.
None of this has been proven in a German court. Marsalek has not been charged with espionage in Germany, only with fraud, embezzlement, and breach of trust. The espionage allegations sit in investigative reporting and in testimony heard at the Old Bailey, not yet in a German indictment.
The blindness
BaFin, Germany’s financial regulator, spent more time investigating short-sellers and journalists than investigating Wirecard. Its February 2019 ban on short positions in Wirecard stock, issued in response to the FT’s reporting on accounting irregularities in the company’s Singapore operations, is now studied as a textbook case of capture by the national champion narrative.
The chancellor’s office had lobbied for Wirecard in China. German diplomats had promoted it abroad. When the Philippine central bank governor Benjamin Diokno told reporters in June 2020 that none of the missing €1.9 billion had ever entered the Philippine banking system, and BDO and BPI denounced as fabrications the documents Wirecard had used to claim the funds were held in trust, the story finally broke open. It had been hiding behind regulatory deference for half a decade.
The Marsalek angle adds a darker layer to that institutional blindness. The man accused in court of helping direct a Russian spy cell had, for years before that, been a board-level executive at a DAX 30 company doing business with German government contractors. Nobody appears to have stopped the Syria trips. Nobody appears to have treated the Novichok boast as a warning sign. Nobody asked hard enough why the COO of a payments company was meeting Austrian politicians with Kremlin ties.
The fugitive who answers his email
Consider what this actually looks like. A man wanted on two continents corresponds with his German lawyer. His instructions are read into evidence at the Old Bailey. Journalists know roughly where his dacha is. The BKA knows what he looks like. And none of it matters, because the country sheltering him has decided he is worth more inside its borders than any diplomatic price it might pay for keeping him there.
That is not a manhunt failure. That is the system working exactly as Moscow designed it. A €1.9 billion accounting fraud at a DAX 30 company was, on the available evidence, also a decade-long intelligence operation that German regulators chose not to see, German politicians chose to promote, and German prosecutors only began to understand after the suspect was already gone. The fraud charges in Munich will eventually produce a verdict. The harder question — how a Russian asset was permitted to run a European payments giant in full view of the institutions paid to notice — has no court date.
So the real scandal is not that Jan Marsalek escaped. It is that nothing about the system that let him operate has meaningfully changed. Ask which BaFin official lost their career over this. Ask which intelligence service has published a post-mortem. Ask, and listen to the silence.
