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Jan Marsalek, former director of the German payments company, is said to be linked to a scheme that also involves sanctioned Russian oligarchs...
Jan Marsalek, the former director of Wirecard, who fled to Moscow after the German company went bankrupt in 2020, when a €1.9 billion fraud came to light, is linked, through the Bulgarian espionage network he ran in the United Kingdom, to a sanctioned money laundering scheme involving drug dealers and Russian oligarchs.
The Financial Times reports that, according to the British NCA, the spies received funding from two criminal networks known as Smart and TGR.
The networks collect money from drug trafficking, arms trafficking, and illegal immigration, transform it into cryptocurrencies, and send it to criminals or individuals under sanctions.
In the summer of 2023, after police arrested most of the network's members, individuals close to Russian intelligence attempted to use Smart to finance Bulgarian spies while Marsalek was in Moscow.
According to the NCA, the scheme was used by oligarchs and the Kinahan cartel, the Irish cocaine trafficking network linked to numerous contract killings, monetaweb writes.
Smart is run by Ekaterina Zhdanova, a Russian national under US sanctions and currently in custody in France, while TGR is run by George Rossi, a Ukrainian national born in Russia, also under US sanctions.
The NCA investigation, called Operation Destabilize, resulted in 128 arrests and the seizure of over £25 million in cash and cryptocurrencies.
Investigators highlighted how the Russian state tried to cooperate with criminal gangs to circumvent Western sanctions imposed after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
To discourage anyone from collaborating with these networks, the NCA placed posters in Russian and English in the toilets of British motorway service areas.
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