On Day 3 of the Wirecard Trial, the prosecution's key witness, Oliver Bellenhaus, is called to testify. The former director of the Wirecard business in Dubai speaks quietly and extremely quickly. He wants to get his testimony over with as quickly as possible and avoids any eye contact. In essence, he confirms what he has already said during the questioning at the public prosecutor's office. The TPA system was a big fraud, audit data was faked, and Wirecard was a cancer, Bellenhaus told the court.
The Wirecard trial begins on 8 Dec 2022. The main question will be: Who is responsible for the scandal? Markus Braun, the founder and former CEO, Oliver Bellenhaus, managing director of Wirecard Dubai, and the former head of accounting, Stephan von Erffa have to answer critical questions! Braun and his accomplices are alleged to have operated Wirecard as a criminal organization, the indictment says. The court has scheduled 100 days of hearings. In an underground courtroom.
The Powercash21 scheme is already over 20 years old and was created parallel to the collapsed Wirecard. At that time, the buzzword fintech was not even known. The domain www.powercash21.com was registered in 2000 by Ruediger Trautmann even before he became COO of Wirecard in 2005. From 2001, the website was operated by the German Inatec Group. Among others, the former Wirecard manager Dietmar Kuhl acted as managing director at Inatec. In or around 2011, the Cyprus-registered Powercash21 Limited then took over the website's operation.
The Similarweb September statistics came out and show that the number of visitors to the website of Cypriot-German payment processor Payabl (formerly PowerCash21) increased tenfold in Q3 2022 - from just under 15,000 to almost 140,000. Similarweb says that more than 55% of website traffic has been sourced from porn sites and just under 35% from gambling, betting, and lottery sites. Payabl is thus likely to have replaced the collapsed Wirecard in Germany as the high-risk payment processor, Similarweb suggests!
The German Ruediger Trautmann was Wirecard’s COO between 2005 to 2010. According to the Zatarra Report, Trautmann incorporated numerous undisclosed companies in the Wirecard scheme during his tenure. One of these satellite companies was Wire Card UK Limited, where he served as a director from 2006 until its dissolution in 2010. This Wire Card UK did not belong to the German Wirecard Group but was part of the scheme. The similarity of the names was probably no coincidence.