Four years after Wirecard executive Jan Marsalek vanished – leaving a €1.9 billion hole in the payment company’s books – a new investigation suggests he escaped to Russia with the help of an erotic actress turned spy, and is now living using the identity of an Orthodox priest.
A joint investigation by Germany’s Spiegel, Austria’s Standard and two other media outlets claims Marsalek was having an affair in 2014 with actress-spy Natalja Slobina when she introduced him at her 30th birthday party to a former special forces operative.
Stanislav “Stas” Petlinsky reportedly noticed Vienna-born Marsalek was “obsessed” with espionage and passed him on to Russia’s GRU intelligence service.
In the following six years, according to the media investigation, the executive lead a double life. As Wirecard’s chief operating officer by day, he built the digital payments business; by night and on weekends he courted Russian mercenaries, passed on information to Moscow, flew fighter planes and fired rocket-launchers in Syria.
[ Two Austrians arrested for organising escape of Wirecard’s Jan MarsalekOpens in new window ]
Founded in 1999, Wirecard was close to collapse when fellow Austrian Marcus Braun came on board. With 20-year-old coder Marsalek as his number two, they turned the processor of porn-and-gambling website payments into a major online payments operator with ambitions to be Europe’s PayPal.
The Munich-based firm was, in reality, a giant Ponzi scheme, moving money around to inflate the company’s valuation. When its fraudulent practices were exposed by a Financial Times investigation in 2019, Braun was arrested and he is now on trial for fraud while the fugitive Marsalek remains on Europe’s most-wanted list.
Disowned by his own mother as a “prepubescent big-shot”, Marsalek’s first contacts with Russia reportedly began around 2010 as Wirecard sought contracts there.
During his regular trips there Marsalek met Slobina, then a 29-year-old advertising executive and dealmaker. In a previous career, aged just 13, she reportedly starred in an erotic lesbian vampire film called Red Lips 2 – Blood Lust. She played a Russian secret agent who kills her victims using a nerve agent.
Drawn together by a love of expensive hotels and BDSM, the two reportedly began a sideline business laundering Chechnyan warlord money – unknown to Marsalek’s Wirecard colleagues and his fiancée in Munich.
Der Spiegel tracked down Stanislav “Stas” Petlinsky to a Dubai resort, who confirmed that he “fell in love” with Marsalek “from the first moment” they met at Slobina’s 30th birthday party.
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“He has such a beautiful mind. I always think so small, in dimensions of what’s possible,” he added. “Jan always thinks big, very, very big.”
Later in the interview, Petlinsky describes Marsalek as “a bit autistic” and someone who “lacks empathy”.
As Wirecard’s fraudulent operations began to unravel in June 2020, Marsalek began an elaborate disappearing act.
Using the identity of a Georgian billionaire, Marsalek flew from a private airfield near Vienna to Belarus. The following day, he drove over the border into Russia, aided by a Putin ally, and is now living in Moscow. According to the investigation, he has assumed the identity of Konstantin Baiazov, an Orthodox priest with a similar appearance, living 460km further south in Lipetsk.
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