The money was not stolen; it never existed in the first place.
The fraud at Wirecard started before Marsalek seems to have been recruited as a Russian asset; the GRU probably didn’t even know it was happening until fairly late in the game. As frauds tend to do, it snowballed, until you’re setting up a Potemkin bank branch in the Philippines to get your auditor off your back about the couple billion Euros in cash you claim to have.
Still, I can think of a few reasons why an intelligence service might want to be connected to the wealthy COO of a company that processes payments for porn websites and offshore casinos…
The fraud at Wirecard started before Marsalek seems to have been recruited as a Russian asset; the GRU probably didn’t even know it was happening until fairly late in the game. As frauds tend to do, it snowballed, until you’re setting up a Potemkin bank branch in the Philippines to get your auditor off your back about the couple billion Euros in cash you claim to have.
Still, I can think of a few reasons why an intelligence service might want to be connected to the wealthy COO of a company that processes payments for porn websites and offshore casinos…