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8Cast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcast everywhere. 8Cast.com Hello, it's Kamal here. Today, a team of Russian agents have been found guilty following the biggest spying investigation in Britain. The Spiring, made up of Bulgarians, plotted kidnaps, disinformation campaigns, surveillance against Ukrainian troops, and secret weapon trades with China from their base in Great Yarmouth.
The group received orders from Moscow by Jan Marslek, a fugitive tech boss, and one of the most wanted men in Europe. Today for Daily Tea listeners, a special set of episodes. This weekend we are handing over the Daily Tea podcast to telegraph special correspondent, Hady Dixon, who has been on the trail of Marslek for over a year and has made three special investigative episodes. You're about to hear episode 1 and episode 2 and 3 will be published on Saturday and Sunday.
It's an unassuming guesthouse in the seaside town of Great Yarmouth, but it's no holiday home. There are boxes piled up in every room with tech equipment and bags full of cables. There are metal storage shelves across the walls. For almost three years, behind its mundane facade, a group of Bulgarians have been running aspiring for Russia.
And in February 2023, after an investigation, the police finally cracks down. Five Bulgarian nationals appeared in court today, suspected of spying for Russia. They were charged with conspiracy to conduct espionage. Prosecutions for espionage in British courts were extremely rare.
Usually spies get put on a plane and expelled from the country. This case, however, is different. These aren't Russians spying for the motherland. They are EU citizens, carrying out the orders of the Russian state on British soil.
And because they were plotting in the UK, they will be prosecuted here. The defendants, all Bulgarian nationals, were held in February and have been remanded in custody since. Now it is alleged that they were working for the Russian security services. The story made front page news, and in September 2023, the case opened at Westminster Magistrates.
The press gathered in a hushed courtroom to hear the charges. The Bulgarians joined via video link from their prisons, standing and speaking only to confirm their names and dates of birth. As they sat down, the prosecutor began outlining the case against them. Journalist furiously scribbling shorthand to try and get down every word.
These charges were classed as terrorism offenses, she said. She described how the allegations of kidnapping and surveillance were so serious, they would have to refer to one of Britain's most senior judges. And then, she dropped a bombshell. The taskler from Moscow was a man whose name was known by many in the courtroom, Jan Maslek.
But he wasn't known as a spy. He had been the boss at one of Germany's most successful tech firms. And he had allegedly been behind one of the country's biggest financial scandals. In 2020, he went on the run.
And until that day in Westminster, he had not been heard from for three years. Interpol had been searching for him. The press across Europe had been searching for him. No one knew if he was even alive.
Until that day, when it became clear that he had been giving orders on behalf of the Kremlin. That trial that brought Maslek back into the limelight has concluded this week after a two-year-long court battle. So I've been trying to understand Jan Maslek's unusual life, a whizkit from a tiny Austrian town, who first was allegedly Germany's biggest white collar criminal. And who ended up as a Russian operative plotting surveillance, kidnappings and disinformation campaigns in the UK and across the world.
Because it has everything that you need for a gangster movie or gangster, and it has like intelligent services, organized crime, money laundering and digital finance. So who is Jan Maslek? How did he use his wealth and connections to join the world of intelligence? It seems like a...a sexperient tragedy.
It really does. I'm Hadi Dixon, special correspondent at the Telegraph. And I've been tracing Jan Maslek from the boardroom to the courtroom. And this is the day to investigate the tech boss who was Russia's secret spy.
Episode 1. All roads lead to Maslek. Jan Maslek's story starts in Ashheim, near Munich in 2000. He's 20.
He's a school drop out with no qualifications, but he's a computer genius. And he's a slim and clean shaven with short-crop tail and a pair of thin glasses that suit the persona of an I.T. nerd. He's just been hired by an up-and-coming tech company called Wirecard.
Wirecard is one of the first platforms that processed online payments. It was hailed as Germany's answer to PayPal. These days you can buy everything from everywhere at any time. The new technologies are emerging at the fast pace and change the way we search, select and buy.
I loved Wirecard. I loved working there. It was a wonderful place to work. This is Martin Osterlo.
He joined Wirecard in the early days when it was everything you'd expect from a young company hiring computer wiz kids. The staff would turn up to the office dressed in their t-shirts and jeans. You wouldn't get that at the Daily Telegraph. Everyone knew each other.
We had a cafeteria where basically you knew from employee 1 to 220, like a family of employees. It also had some of the rougher elements of a start-up company. It did have a higher-end fire culture. It was a make-money-or-leave type of culture right from the onset.
Maslek's computer skills became invaluable to the fledgling company. So when you met him, the first impression was extremely good because he was such a charming guy. In fact, over the years, and I don't want to sound like I'm idolizing him too much, but I really envied him for the way that he was able to charm people. He did have a certain aura about him, a certain energy, which was extremely addictive, a natural charisma in a form where I've seldom ever experienced that with other people.
Like a lot of text art apps, Wirecard had a stratospheric rise. It was undoubtedly of importance to the German economy. In 2018, it had done the unthinkable. On paper, it was bigger than Deutsche Bank, with its shares supposedly worth 24 billion euros.
At one point, the country's then-Chancellor, Angela Merkel, had even lobbied for the company during an official trip to China. It was an incredible experience. The witnessing rise that was unprecedented and a fall that probably was unprecedented in Germany, of such a big company, was a hell of an experience. It was almost like a movie.
Maslek seemed tailor-made for the world of high finance, confident, quick-witted and always one step ahead. Qualities propelled him to the heart of Wirecard's success. Soon, he had become the company's chief operating officer. He led a lavish lifestyle, rubbing shoulders with a rich and famous, having dinner with former presidents, and all the while boasting about his new life.
After work, he'd jump into the back of one of his sports cars and go out on the town. There were a couple of very posh places where celebrities also went, and they would have bills in the thousands of euros. In a video posted by the German newspaper Handelsblatt, Maslek can be seen trying to pop a bottle of expensive champagne on one of his decadent evenings. Well, if I find a weak spot for the diamond, what's the serious?
I think it's your problem. It's one time. You're a killer proper? Maslek went all out.
Everything you'd expect from a 20-something who got access to a lot of money all at once. But fine wine and expensive meals were not necessarily enough. He would invest money or invest his connections to actually experience shooting a gun or a rocket launcher or something like that, experiencing the extreme. That was on the one side, on the other hand, he didn't have a driver's license.
So there were certain contradictions even in that. He was flying around in private jets but didn't have a driver's license. But behind Wirecard's Meteorix success, they turned out to be a whole lot of lies. The payments the platform processed often came from gambling and pornography, a world full of money laundering and legal transactions.
Early on, the company was accused of balance sheet fraud, the first and the string of allegations that were made repeatedly throughout its rise. Then, in June 2020, the tech giant completely unravelled and so did Maslek's persona. Just a week before the company collapsed, Martin saw a very different side to Maslek. We had a video conference about a company that we potentially wanted to acquire and he sent us a presentation he was going to hold in front of the other board members.
He had put some elements in there that were just not correct. We told him, basically, you need to change this. And an hour later, he hadn't changed the thing. So he blatantly lied to the rest of the board.
And the three of us were awestruck. But it just was not possible to contradict him. That would have been our jobs. If we had sort of said, no, we told him not to put this in.
It would have been out of a job within seconds. So we played along but each one of us looked at each other like, what do we do? That was quite an experience. Now, people tell untruth or they exaggerate, but an explicit lie after we told him not to.
That was one of the moments where he turned on me. There's something going on here. This guy was always about big and bigger. Maybe that was his downfall.
He wanted War Card to be explosively big and he found every means to do it. When War Card collapsed in 2020, with a 1.9 billion Euro hole in his books, it was the largest company ever to go bust in Germany. Marcelech and the rest of War Card's executive team are sacked. War Card's officers and his apartment are raided by the police.
The executive team is arrested. War Card's CEO is put in custody, accused of fraud, market manipulation and money laundering. So are the chief financial officer and the former head of accounting. They are currently on trial in Germany.
But while officers are preparing to arrest him, Marcelech is in the back of a taxi, speeding on the motorway and leaving Vienna behind him. He's dressed in Prada from head to toe when he steps out on the tarmac of Bad Voslau Airfield. He's a small airport located in Lower Austria with a few hangers that hold private jets, a tower and a single restaurant. The day he was fired, I wrote him an SMS where I basically told him it's been an honor.
We had a very humorous back and forth. And he told me he was going into the sun for a while. He was going to a place like the Philippines looking for the money, which in the subsequent days you heard more and more rumors about the fact that perhaps he was running from the police. The pieces fell together and you heard more and more about money being embezzled and things like that.
But Marcelech didn't fly to the Philippines. He didn't look for the missing money. Instead, in the early hours of the evening, he boarded a private jet to Minsk, the capital of Belarus. Bad Voslau Airfield has just become the scene of a getaway by a man who would go on to be one of Europe's most wanted criminals.
A businessman who, unbeknownst to all, has just affected to Russia. Marcelech would go missing for three years before his name reappeared in the Westminster courtroom, which is where my investigation started. How did he use Wirecard to build ties with intelligence? Was he a Russian spy during his time at Wirecard?
More on this after the break. It's not entirely surprised that Yammer Select got embroiled in the intelligence world, and it didn't all start with the CD world swarming behind Wirecard. Marcelech's fascination for intelligence seems to have deeply personal ties. Yammer Select's grandfather also was a spy to some degree, and that's very interesting because he was also suspected of passing on information to the Soviets during the occupation of Austria.
Thomas Reagler is a historian in intelligence matters, hence his interest in the Marcelech case. I wonder if this could be the key to unlock the secret of Yammer Select. Yammer Select was born in 1980, ten years before the fall of the USSR. He grew up in the town of Costa Neiberg in Austria, and his father left when he was just a child.
This connection between grandfather Grenzon is often quite intense, so there must have been some kind of influence of course coming from this person, especially when he's such a rich experience of history. In modern Austria, Janz grandfather, Hans Marcelech, has become a well-known figure of the post-war era. His grandfather was not only an artsy resistance fighter, but he also contributed to the establishment of the Austrian state police, which is also heavily involved in intelligence matters. Growing up he might have had a bit of knowledge of spying then if that's what the grandfather was doing.
It must have left a big impression on him because you have to remember that Hans Marcelech is now remembered as one of the leading figures in creating public memory about the Nazi past. He's greatly renowned in Austria. His past as an intelligence agent is not very much in the public knowledge, but it also must have contributed, of course, to Marcelech's fascination about the world of intelligence. When your grandfather, for example, tells you about how he now hunted Nazi war criminals, this must have left some kind of impression.
My visitors is hometown, just outside Vienna, to see if we could find out more about the real Jan Marcelech from his mother and brother. We knocked on their door to see if they were willing to speak to us. So we found the house, it was quite an old house, and it had sort of painted, typical Viennese painted windows, a large wooden door with an old-style bell that you actually rang the bell rather than pressed a buzzer. And it was on quite quiet street in Keating with a river one side and then narrow space of cars and then the houses in the other side.
So we rang the bell, and it took a little while. I didn't think that anyone would have to hear us actually because it was such an old-style bell. Eventually the brother opened one of the windows and poked his head out, and I confirmed that it was the right person and told him who I was. It turns out that many of the people I tried to interview for this podcast, Marcelech's close family don't want to engage with journalists, which is not that surprising.
Marcelech left home at 19 when he moved to Munich to get his foot in the door of the tech world, and in doing so he shut the door in his family, who say they haven't had much contact with him since. But he had heard a rumour that Marcelech was still in touch with his dad, despite him leaving when he was only a child, so I tried to track him down too. Could he tell me anything to understand his son's character better? Like so many involved in this case.
Sache Marcelech was a particularly difficult man to get hold of. Searches for addresses and contact details have involved trawling through company registers in every language from German to Hebrew, looking through Austrian secret investigation files, scouring through electoral roles, and asking for help from various sources. It was through company registers in the Czech Republic that I traced Sache to a flat in Prague. When I rang the bell, no one answered.
After repeating this a few times, I realised that every time I rang that bell, a person came out onto the balcony that was hanging over the door. He wouldn't even answer the door to me, and I ended up having to shout up to him on his balcony. Hey, are you going to be Sache Marcelech? Sache Marcelech?
After Mr Kiravan? Sorry, do you speak in English? I understand there will be. Are you Sache Marcelech?
Yes, my name is Hayley, I'm from the Daily Telegraph in London. I wanted to talk to you about your son, Jan. And what about you at the top with me? I just wanted to talk to you about whether you've spoken to him in a while, or if you know anything about his whereabouts, whether you're still in touch with him?
No? Sorry, Matt. No? No?
Ok, thank you. You did say that it was going to be quite difficult to get people on the record in regards to the story. Did you expect the reaction that we got when we were door knocking? This is my producer, Georgia.
Not really, I do do a lot of door knocks in my job investigating, and you obviously do get a mixed reaction from people on different stories. But I think with this story, particularly it's been quite difficult because, I mean, Jan Marcelech, a lot of people have said that the attention that he's brought them in their lives has actually ruined their lives really. After Marcelech's escape to Bellavose, all these extraordinary stories emerged. It turned out that Marcelech was not just a businessman, or an alleged fraudster, but in reality, he'd been working as a Russian spy for over a decade, and it all started thanks to Wirecard, back to his colleague Martin Osterlo.
It doesn't surprise me completely that he had connections to security, undercover, etc. Of course it surprised me completely that he's supposed to be connected to the FSB or KGB. I would have never thought of that. Wirecard was one of the early payments processing services.
In the early noughties, the world wide web was still an unexplored continent, full of possibilities for money. For power. It was a world swarming with CD characters. Behind the company's sleek facade, its foundations were a lot murkier.
Like when there's a gold rush, there are also some fraudulent people there. I was curious just about how this new world of digital finance works, and it was what prompted my interest. Fabio de Masi is a member of the European Parliament. At the time of Wirecard's collapse in 2020, he had been sitting as an MP for the left party in Germany's Bundestag.
Wirecard and Marcelech have become somewhat of a passion project for him. I was probably the first journal politician who raised critical questions about Wirecard before they went fast, and later I was part of the inquiry committee on the Wirecard scandal in the journal parliament. It was 2017 when he first started looking into the company. Marcelech had been working there for 17 years and was a member of the executive team.
I had dealt with issues of money laundering, so the journalists approached me, and after the financial crisis, there was this big talk about fintechs being the new game and town companies that actually do business with data and they use the internet and the data economy to facilitate financial transactions. Wirecard was amazing hype in Germany. We also took it all. Germany now has a 21st century company, Wirecard.
I was a bit skeptical from the beginning. Apparently, there was an interest from the security environment on the data they possessed because they had a lot of customers from terrorist violence, or less crime. Wirecard is really a prime target for intelligence because it provides a window into the shadow economy. It's a historian Thomas Regalou again.
You have to remember that all those transactions are extremely valuable to any kind of intelligence service. Fabio de Masi tells me that there was no doubt that Marcelech had access to information that would have been of use to the security services. At some stage, I remember that Masalich claimed that he needed a whole data set of his customers to deliver it to the German intelligence service. That's right.
The German intelligence services have claimed that they never asked for that. Exactly. They claimed that they never asked for that, and I cannot prove that they have wrong on that, but I have my doubts that they are saying the truth. Originally, this started as a – well, for many people, I think you said since 2017 you had suspicions about being connected to Espionage.
But for many people in 2020 thought was just a financial scandal. Actually, it turns out it's got quite a lot of links to Espionage. Yes, absolutely. There are all the allegations that the young Masalich would cooperate with the Russian intelligence, but there were also a lot of contact points to Austrian intelligence members, former intelligence members.
Very often, as former intelligence members, it seems to be a pattern because then maybe some services can say we don't have anything officially to do with it. But it is really a little bit too much to be a coincidence. And what Fabio suggests is that cooperating with the police probably helped Wyacard and Masalich get away with some of the company's wrongdoing. This might have been an entry point.
It's my hypothesis where they said, okay, maybe if we cooperate, we continue with our business model, but we cooperate sometimes with the agencies that allows us to kick the candle on the road. Wyacard was so big that it seemed unfetchable. Masalich is said to have told a colleague, we have so much money that we can do anything. We are so important to the German government that with every major disaster that occurs, the next day it appears as if it never happened.
What's surprising is just how much Masalich was involved with security agencies across the world. As soon as you start to scratch the surface, you realise that this guy had his fingers in every pie imaginable, and he made no secret of it. If you tried to tell that story to the public, which we did in Quiaconti, sometimes people would look at you, they would think that you're a little bit cuckoo. It sounds like a thriller or a conspiracy theory, but actually all these things I'm telling you right now are just well documented facts.
Investigations into the wrongdoing at Wyacard found that Masalich had appointed himself as the head of enemy reconnaissance. Now that isn't the language of the boardroom, that's quite dark, the language of espionage and warfare. Through Wyacard, he had hired private investigators, including former spies, to carry out surveillance on the company's critics and those who were questioning their practices. Some of the critics were victims of cyber attacks, and one was even punched in the head outside her New York apartment.
Masalich made no secret of his links to the intelligence community. And then after Wyacard broke down, all these stories came out, and so he actually walked around with a tattoo on his forehead. I mean that's a metaphor, he didn't really have a tattoo on his forehead, but with a tattoo on his forehead, you know, just talked to me, I'm not sure. Just talked to me, I'm connected in the intelligence community.
He boasted to his inner circle that Wyacard produced credit cards for secret services across the world, and that he'd worked for the British, the US, Mossad in Israel, and the BND, Germany's Foreign Intelligence Agency. At the time, it wasn't clear what was true and what was just bravado, but evidence has since emerged that Wyacard was being used by the German intelligence agencies and the secret police. One source told me that Masalich did have a very good connection with the representative of MI6 in London. Over his years at Wyacard, there were more disturbing stories.
No one's really pieced all of these stories together, but I have. They all point to Masalich's growing ties to Russia. They link Masalich to assassination attempts and war crimes. One of them takes us right back to the UK.
Just behind me about a hundred feet over there beneath that tent is actually the bench where this former spy and his daughter were found. Now 48 hours later, the police cordon still here, and it's now an investigation that's drawn coming from the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson. In March 2018, in the quiet, peaceful town of Salisbury, Sergei Skripow, a former Russian military intelligence officer who had been a double agent for Britain, was poisoned alongside his daughter, 33-year-old Ulya. Both were found unconscious on a part bench in the late afternoon outside Azizi Italian restaurant.
I was actually one of the reporters on the scene, and witnesses told me how initially they thought they were drunk. But as they were rushed to hospital, the truth emerged, and the town centre was turned into a scene of chemical warfare. The cordon was absolutely huge, and police officers in hazmat suits were carefully picking over the evidence. Russian agents had smeared a nerve agent on the handle of Mr Skripow's front door, poisoning father and daughter, and a police officer, D.S.
Nick Bailey, who had gone to investigate. Letting me put in his on record, saying that there's a difference between enemies and traitors. Enemies you fight with, but you hope someday you can reach some kind of agreement. Mark Galliotti is an expert in Russian security and intelligence.
Traitors, on the other hand, you can do nothing but kill them. The Skripow's were poisoned using a nerve agent called Novijock, which is this nerve agent that is very distinctive for Russia, and it was really about the theatre of assassination. There are easier, simpler, lower tech ways of killing someone, but they wanted to do it in a way that was going to be high-profile, splashy, and would allow them to, on the one hand, say it was nothing to do with us. But with a kind of a sly wink that says, but you know it really was us.
Just a few months later, in the autumn, Marcelek shows up in London with a copy of a highly classified report on the incident, written by the organisation for the prohibition of chemical weapons, which is an intergovernmental organisation. He shows it to traitors and even handed a copy to Paul Murphy, the head of investigations at the Financial Times. Authorities believe Marcelek got hold of the documents through his links to Austrian intelligence. So here's your Marcelek, he's a big tech businessman, and he's got a copy of a top secret formula used in Russian assassinations.
And therefore, you know, to actually have no bit of details in your possession, well, it shows one of two things. One is maybe you actually might want to be in a position to create and use it. Or secondly, it just shows a certain amount of fan boishness of the rather more cynical and heavy-handed forms of Russian intelligence activity. By November 2018, the news had reached Bernard Schmidbauer, a former German minister, who in the 90s, and himself in the nickname 008, as the coordinator of the German intelligence services.
So, how do you went to find 008, didn't you? That's producer Georgia again. I did. I actually climbed a mountain to try and find 008.
It was a bit of a nightmare because I got to Germany and then I got a tip off from the source of mine that he actually moved to Austria, just over the border from where I was. But stupidly, I don't give up to hire car to drive in Germany, not in Austria. And so I didn't want to waste any time, so I decided that rather than try and change anything, I just parked at the border and walked to his house. But when I made that decision, I hadn't really thought about the fact that I was in the Alps.
I hope your risk assessment included trekking through mountains. Well, actually, when I got there, I was pretty out of breath to be honest with you. His wife answered the door and told me that I should have called, which obviously is a really good idea if only I'd have had his phone number. And I would have done that instead of getting out of breath walking through the Alps.
She took my card and showed me he would call me back, which he never did. Often the way we've investigated reporting, I'm not sure. Absolutely. I'm used to people shutting doors in my face or promising a call back that no materialised is normally, I haven't climbed a mountain together though.
So, Mr Schmidbauer wouldn't talk to me directly, but he did tell a German parliamentary inquiry that Maastalex possession of the Novotok document was discussed crisscross through intelligence services all over the world. As I was saying to Georgia, Mr Schmidbauer told the Bundestag that he believed that every service that had influenced at this point was eager to talk to Maastalex about the access that he had through Wirecard to closely monitor certain money laundering operations and organise crime. He revealed to German MPs that Maastalex boasted to him during their meetings that he had security authorities across the world in his pocket and that he claimed that he'd been talking to them for years. Mr Schmidbauer said he believed that every intelligence service that respected itself had to have Maastalex on their radar and that they would have been stupid if they'd not used services that he could have offered.
So this comes back to Fabio de Massey's suspicion that law enforcement agencies could have been turning a blind eye on Maastalex and Wirecard more generally because of what they had to offer. I found another troubling story from around the same time involved Russia's Wagner Group, which is a paramilitary unit that's been associated with conflict zones across the globe. It's involved in security in Africa, in fighting in Syria and Ukraine. Everywhere they've been, there have been reports of systematic war crimes, torture, murder, and who seems to have been in contact with them?
You guessed it, Maastalex. That's yet another example of where Maastalex's political contacts cross over with the undercover world. Kylian Kleinschmidt is a humanitarian turn consultant. He's worked on developing aid and reconstruction projects.
When I speak to him, he tells me about an aborted contract with Maastalex. Looking back, it's dotted with Russian fingerprints. So it's a lot, sort of, indicated a very strong Russian connection, also to say that in his first meeting, probably there should have been much more cautious. In 2017, Kylian is working with the Austrian Chancellor, Christine Kern, on projects studying migration in Africa.
And so one day, Kylian sits down for a business lunch in Kaefer, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Central Munich. The soft glow of candlelight flickers off rustic wooden beams, and the scent of freshly baked bread and sizzling Bavarian delicacies drifts through the air. Each of the 16 private dining rooms has its own character. Some, aligned with antique furniture and deep plush armchairs.
Others showcase vintage wine racks and elegant chandeliers that cast golden light across crisp white tablecloths. Across the table from Kylian is Jan Maastalex. During that first lunch, Kylian is asked to conduct a study on Reconstruction projects for Libya, a country that has descended into chaos and war since the fall of its dictator, Gaddafi, in 2011. How can they help the economy and make the country a destination for foreign workers?
The project was due to be funded by Maastalex with the promise of a 20,000 euro cash injection from the Austrian government. Yes, I agree. It sounded good. Have the private sector, somebody from the private sector, investing in fact in a development and standardization strategy project in a country such as Libya.
Kylian and his team start working on a plan. They went all through the Austrian consulting firm, including high government officials from the Ministry of Defence, who were working with them, which was a kind of a strange consideration. I've seen a signed promise of payment from a brigadier in the Ministry of Defence. The invoices to Maastalex were supposed to be made out to the Russian Libyan Cultural Institute in Moscow.
An organisation, actually, it seems, doesn't exist. But things go awry. Maastalex doesn't pay. Kylian and Maastalex end up meeting again several months later.
In February 2018, they had their second meeting at Maastalex Villa in Munich. They had a meeting that culminated our collaboration because that became clear that we had diverging views. In what way did that become clear to you during the meeting? There's a couple of other stories around that, which made us very nervous, which involved indicators that there was too much connection to the restaurant.
It soon became clear that this wasn't about aid for a struggling nation, or even just about making money by rebuilding an economy. And then he started insisting on border control. Libya is one of the countries that a lot of refugees and migrants either come from or travel through in order to get to Europe. He had already mentioned in his first meeting with me in Munich restaurant, De Kefa.
He said, yeah, border control is important if you talk about migration. So he insisted on demobilising a militia and shifting them into a border guard and equipping and training them. And I said, well, that may be part of any, let's say, demobilisation and civilisation programme fine, but we are not experts in that. So, militias, isn't what you did in your more humanitarian side of things?
It has to be, but I didn't simply have to expertise on what we call a demobilisation programme for militia. It didn't have to expertise that would have been a totally different weapon. He insisted on converting basically 15,000, maybe 20,000 militia men into border guards and equipping and training them. I mean, it's a major project and for that we need to have an expertise, which we at that point didn't have.
We had to develop a new project. You combine that normally with other measures such as economic development, social development and so on. But that was not of his interest somehow. He had made some comments that made Cillian pretty uncomfortable.
He also mentioned that he had been to Bambila in Syria. Fascinated again by the boys and they were so nice. And just after the recapture of Bambila from ISIS. And as far as we know, Bambila was recaptured by Wagner, by the Wagner mercenaries.
And so somehow he was in contact with them. And I should have reacted to this. So I had quite angry with myself. I was too excited about the Olivia project instead of saying who's this guy.
I mean, why is he in Russia? Why is he flying to Syria? Yeah. Then Marzalek brings another startling anecdote.
So there was so no fun. And he's already then in before the meeting, he got a mass headache together with these two Austrians who attended that meeting. Made remarks, which were quite scary. He talked about equipment.
And we had to discuss about them with them about the equipment, including body cams. And he was boasting about video material, which would be great to show, but you can't show it because the boys are killing all the prisoners. Right. And he was laughing.
So that was sort of the setting. So we felt very uncomfortable. Do you think when he was talking about the boys and the video camera, do you think that now that he was referring to the Wagner group in those conversations? I think one of those paramilitary and mercenary outfits for sure.
When Kylian finished with his tail, I was gobsmacked. It's a businessman who appears to be joking about watching people commit war crimes. Who laughs at watching people getting shot? My investigation links Marzalek to some violent Russian crimes.
Another chock assassination attempt in the UK. A mercenary group in Africa. He even apparently confessed to having witnessed war crimes. In hindsight, he seemed to have tried to etch a plan to control migration with the government of Austria.
One of the UK's allies. I looked into this trip to Palmyra in Syria that Marzalek mentioned to Kylian. It happened in 2017. The Austrian police also investigated it.
And I managed to get my hands on some of their files. They showed that the trip was organised by a man linked to Russian intelligence. And that once on the ground in Syria, they were shown around by the head of intelligence for the Wagner group. I've since discovered that the trip was organised at Marzalek's suggestion.
They arranged for him to fire a rocket-propelled grenade. He went dressed in full combat gear. And he made no secret of this trip. He bragged to his friends about firing weapons and showed them pictures himself in the war zone.
And at Wirecard, where I remember he thought he was untouchable, his links to Russia were an open secret. In a chat with one colleague, he had joked about how his Russians would shoot journalists who were asking questions. Or said that if people had issues with the accounts he was running, then they should go and talk directly to Vladimir Putin. His outspoken is very interesting.
He's hiding in plain sight. Historian Thomas Riegler again. Because nobody would expect from a spy that he talks openly about it. So it could have been a kind of manoeuvre to shake off any suspicions.
Because who would suspect somebody as a spy if he talks so much about being in the company of Russian figures and anything. So it could have been a deliberate way of mutting the water here. There was another anecdote that stayed with Martin. Marzalek's colleague at Wirecard.
It was a joke that Marzalek had made at the Christmas party that may have actually pointed to what was really going on behind the scenes of the company. Martin, if you steal a hundred thousand, a hundred thousand from Wirecard, I would have no respect for you. If you're going to steal money, it has to be a hundred of millions. And of course he said that as a joke.
But it certainly rang out as very dark humour in regards to what literally probably happened with the Indian deals. And similar that he embezzled hundreds of millions out of the company. So how did Jan Marzalek get recruited by Russia? And how did he avoid detection for years while building up a spy network across Europe?
That takes us on a yacht on the French Riviera. I'm going to try and call Marzalek's Russian handler. Hello? Is that Stanistoff but Linsky?
That's in episode two of the Daily Tea Investigates, the tech boss who was Russian's secret spy.