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Public prosecutors of Munich have dropped some of the criminal prosecution against former Wirecard Chief Executive Markus Braun, because they believe that he is anything but certain to receive a long prison sentence for the remaining charges in the case.
The public prosecutors have taken the decision, announced in a statement from the Munich court on Wednesday, in an attempt to accelerate a case that has been going on since December 2022.
Braun and two other former Wirecard managers are confronted with accusations of having a “criminal racket” that is responsible for fraud worth billions of euros.
One of the drugged costs is accusations of forging the annual results of Wirecard 2015, 26 counts of market manipulation and certain cases of alleged eclipse linked to suspicious loans to Wirecard Business Partners.
Braun continues to be confronted with charges about the alleged counterfeit of the annual results of the Fintech Company 2016 to 2018, a possible inaccurate ad-hoc release about interim findings in a special audit of KPMG and suspicious loans to Asian business partners. He is also accused of cheating a banking consortium on a continuous credit facility of € 1.75 billion.
Braun, who has been in custody since July 2022, has consistently denied misconduct. He argued that he was misled by his second command, Jan Marsalek, who went into hiding after the collapse and is supposed to hide in Russia.
Wirecard, once a high -flying payment company that was valued at its peak at € 24 billion at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, collapsed in insolvency in one of Europe’s largest accounting fraud in 2020.
One of the co -suspects in the process has become the most important witness and proved evidence against Braun.
At the start of the case, the public prosecutors lasted four hours to read the indictment of 89 pages, including accusations of fraud, market and accounting manipulation and embezzlement of five years. According to German law, the maximum possible prison sentence is 15 years.
Presidating Judge Markus Födisch last month suggested to the prosecutors that they had to streamline the indictment. He argued that it would demand considerably extra time to revise the evidence for the currently rotated charges, but it was unlikely that they have a meaningful impact on a possible sentence.
Public prosecutors told the court on Wednesday that they expected “a conviction” for all remaining violations “based on the research results, as well as the findings of the trial”. They added that the remaining alleged crimes were ‘so serious’ that a ‘serious punishment’ could still be imposed.
Before Wednesday’s development there had been no end in sight for the trial and the court had planned hearings for the rest of the year. The court told the FT on Wednesday that it was unclear how much the drop of the charges would shorten the trial.