Before we begin, I just wanted to warn you this episode contains descriptions of physical violence and war. Previously on Hot Money, at.
That point, we just kind of had this sense that Marcello was this kind of man of action and was mixed up somehow in Viennese politics.
I know politics is corrupt, I know everything. I know that, I know that I believed to know that, but this is too much, I thought.
I hope that he will talk to you and you will be able to investigate on it and perps misdeeds and misbehavior stopped.
I'm in tunis, the capital of Tunisia in North Africa. I'm in a taxi on the way to meet Killian Klinsmith. When I first met Killian at Cafe Procul in Vienna, he began to unravel what he knew about Jan Marcelet. It was a fantastical tale. It seemed impossible to substantiate, and as far as Killian was concerned at the time, it was absolutely not for publication. But I believed it, and one of the reasons I did was because I found out more about who Killian is, not just a fantasist,
someone who should be taken deadly seriously yes, monsieur. We kept in touch and now he's ready to talk to me on tape. I can't tell you exactly where he lives. In fact, we've put our phones in Faraday bags to come here, electromagnetic shields that will stop the phones giving away our location. Everything on this trip will be cash only. But what I'll say is it's a big private house on the edge of a fashionable area of the city.
It's surrounded by a high white wall, like all the houses on this dusty street, and there are great clumps of magenta bouganvillia spilling over the top.
It is this way.
Ay Killian, I learned, has never led a conventional life. I'm not even sure he knows what one is, and perhaps that's why he ended up getting so involved in one of Jan marsal X's wildest schemes, something so left field that it helped me truly see marsal x ambitions something about the lives of tens of thousands of the world's most desperate people and how they might be controlled used.
I've often found that people who operate outside the mainstream can be weirdly drawn together, sometimes meeting in the ambiguous space between what the world deems to be good and bad. We tend to think that our values are at the core of us, but people on the edge, well, they can sometimes show us how fragile that notion can be. In this episode, we're gonna hear Killian's story and how he found himself in Yan marslex world one very close but very different to his own.
I have said this census that certain things in my life since then have done terribly wrong that I sometimes think this can be a core incidence.
I'm Sam Jones from The Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. This is Hot Money, Season three, Agent of Chaos, Episode three Prill Seeking, So where do you want us? Killian, as we call them. We're walking across a big, open plan room that takes up almost the whole ground floor. It's cool and airy, and Killian is directing us over to an arrangement of low sofas around a coffee table.
He's left the dogs outside, but indoors, there's an assortment of cats who indifferently reveal themselves to us over the next few hours. Killian grew up in Berlin in the nineteen seventies, and he felt drawn to alternative ways of life from a young age. After some hard partying as a young punk teen, he left Germany aged just eighteen to go and live in the mountains in southern France. And so first there were the goats, thirty five goats to be exact.
Making gold cheese, which is a pain in the neck because you have to get up at four in the morning, five in the morning melting these bloody goats.
So your first job was as a goat farmer basically.
Yes.
Later he founded a housing cooperative, learned how to be a roofer and picked up a series of odd jobs along the way.
Worked as a stuntman somehow Any five Movies We Might Know or How was a TV series Jan dach.
Jehan dark as in Joan of harc Yes, okay, but Killian was still restless. He left France and he decided to tour Africa on a motorbike, and in doing that he stumbled into humanitarian and peacekeeping work through a chance encounter over what else but drinks.
I always tell people when they asked me how did you do your career? I mean how do you apply it? So that said, they got into the baths.
These are my favorite kind of stories. In a bar in Mopti, a city in Marley, Killian met a young French couple. They were building a school and he well, he had those roofing skills, so he helped them out and things just took off from there. He got more construction jobs in the AID world. His responsibilities grew. Eventually, Killian became a trusted partner for the un working across Africa.
He'd found the unconventional life he was looking for, but he'd yet to experience real danger, and then one day all that changed. In nineteen ninety one, Killian was twenty nine with a young family. They were living happily in Uganda. It was early in the morning, so he didn't hear them come in, four men armed. He woke up his wife next to him with a kalashnikov pressed against his head. Someone had told these four boys, really that he had
thirty thousand dollars hidden in the house. It was a setup.
And then they did everything with me what you can do to someone who tried to get thirty thousand dollars.
From as in they beat you up.
Or beating me up, putting me against the wall and saying now we shoot in your legs, Now we rape your wife. We've just killed your gardener. We're just oh, by the way, we killed your cook. Now we're going to kill your baby or baby crying.
I mean, in that moment, did you think you were going to die?
Yes, because at the four guys looking for something they don't get, getting increasingly agitated and angry.
That's it.
They turned the house upside down. The money, of course, wasn't there, but for whatever reason, they didn't kill Killian. In fact, thankfully they didn't kill anyone. They just left Killian badly beaten up. The horror of that experience would have broken most people, and maybe it did Killian, but not how you would expect. I guess most other people, or many other people would think, Okay, that's it. I'm moving back to the Pyrenees with my wife and my
young child. I'm guessing that you didn't do that.
Yeah, that's kind of correct. My wife said, I headed I need a break somehow, and then she left for Canada for many months, and I went and said, now I need to go into it. I need to deep dive into violence.
And he did. In the coming years, Killian would put himself, using his connections in the un into the most dangerous places he could. When the fighting died down in one place, he moved somewhere else, often somewhere with an even more challenging humanitarian situation. South Sudan, Somalia, Zaia, Sri Lanka. He describes days hiding in swamps while being hunted by militias.
I was surrounded by war, I was surrounded by guns. Everything I was in fact afraid of or was there plentiful. I mean I had sort of transformed from the soft gold keeping hippie guy into a tough sort of manager him in the middle of the war. And in transformation goes pretty fast, I must say.
He told me about one time his compound in Mogadishu was attacked.
When we get out of the banker, security says it's all over, but.
There's one guy lying in the street in an army uniform, and too late they realize he's a suicide bomber, and.
He pulls the trigger and then and then sort of all the body pads fly over the.
Wall and the rain between us.
So today, when there's a dead mouse somewhere, that's when everything comes back. That's when the images come back of dead bodies on the road.
In another story, he tells me it's the height of the battle for control of Mogadishu when he and a few others climb up onto the roof of the hotel where they're staying at dusk, heavy orange sun is in the sky.
So we were sitting there with a few people having a beer or whiskey or so, which we've still managed to get and.
Watching the fighting.
I mean, what's crazily wild, pervertly romantic in the same time, like watching Apocalypse Now or something. We're seeing the black Hawks and other choppers flying into the sunset and then again fighting somewhere and shooting, and you're sitting on your roof and over you're whiskey.
The horror, it's also bound up with the thrill, with the sense that this, and not the comforts of a peaceful home life, is what's real. And I do get it. Even listening to Killian recount this stuff is intoxicating. There's a powerful, hugely seductive kind of beauty to it. It's disturbing in some ways, but also cinematic. And who hasn't thought about their lives as a film? Can I just ask,
how are you feeling during this? Were you afraid? I mean, given that you've described earlier that in a way you wanted to plunge into violence to cure yourself with your fear of it maybe or to somehow kind of move beyond it.
I mean that's also what to maintain.
Organizations are exploiting in a way because they're getting people into the sort of this adrenaline hyper thing and they begin to feel invincible. You're becoming the coolest of the coolest in all of this. I mean, you're completely hyped up. I mean I started to feel already very good at this. That was just basically after two and a half years of being in war zones, and it felt I was a champion.
It sounds like a bit of an addiction.
It's, of course it's an addiction, and that's but it's been also used by the organization.
The organization meaning the un his employer at the time. This is how Killian sees it.
Identifying the people becoming junkies, and they set them a shot from time to time, so they stay junkies. You don't get the chance to cool down and get back to your family. I mean I had a family at the time, sitting in there. Robit that recuperation becomes stressful because nobody understands you. I mean, your colleagues become your friends and your family. They understand what it means when you say, well, we had an ied, we had an improvised explosive device, or we had a vbi ID. They
understand what it means. Yes, there has been a car bomb. Nobody else understands. Nobody understands the feeling of what it means.
Killian climbs the UN ladder, but over time he finds his Maverick methods rub up against an increasingly bureaucratic organization, and the way humanitarian work is funded is changing too. NGO and government budgets are going down, the private sector institutions and individual wealthy donors are becoming more important than ever. Over time, Killian begins to feel that perhaps he should at least try a more normal way of life, so after three decades, finally in twenty fourteen, Killian decides to
leave the UN. He settles in Vienna as far as he can settle, and launches an aid consultancy. A burgeoning migrant crisis on Europe's borders and in the Balkans in particular, means he's in high demand, but he doesn't exactly thrill to the work. European governments are mostly looking to find short term domestic solutions for the problem. They don't want to do the hard stuff tackling it at its source
in Africa and the Middle East. The consultancy work is all about fundraising, meetings with stakeholders, trial a la over canopies and powerpoints. It's not a very Killian kind of world. Enter Jan Marcelek. It was around this time that an Austrian lobbyist government connected got in touch. He tells Killian, I want you to meet someone.
I have a client called Jan Masele. He's the CEO of Wire Cards. That is, in his private capacity, he wants to contribute to the stabilization of Libya.
In twenty eighteen, Killian gets an invitation to come and meet his new prospective backer, Marcelek. Marcelex suggests they meet at the keef Schenker, the very place he met my editor Paul Murphy and handed him the chemical formula for Navechok. Keifa Schhenk in English means the ladybird tavern lady barg If you're American, there are little ladybird emblems and pictures dotted around, but it's not Kitchie. This is still a white tablecloth place. All Killian knows is that he's meeting
a wealthy Austrian businessman. He's never heard of Yan Marslek, but that's not an issue, at least nothing A little keyboard due diligence can't smooth.
Started googling a bit and okay, a big luge DAX company.
The DAX is Germany's main stock market index, the forty largest public German companies. A bit like the S and P five hundred or the Footsy one hundred. It signals to Killian that wirecard and mars Lek should be taken seriously.
I had been sort of a lot looking into how the industry, how business can actually do what the humanitarance can do. So I thought was a great idea that if somebody has personal interests or business interests actually contributes, and it's not the humanitarians are going to stabilize places, it's business. It's this type of other resources which the humanitarian world will never produce.
Killian has been told that Marcelek is interested in funding humanitarian projects in Libya. Libya was a mess since the Kadafi regime was deposed in twenty eleven at the height of the Arab Spring. It had been mired in civil war. Nothing about its future seemed at that point certain, and it was also thanks to its newfound lawlessness, a highway for African refugees looking to get into Europe, the longest then unpatrolled coastline of any African country on the Mediterranean.
A reporter with the ft Borzu Daragahi was on the ground to see what conditions in one of the countries notorious migrant detention centers were like.
Hot, dirty, Overcrowded cells like this one are a way of life. At the Garabouli migrant detention Center, just east of Libya's capital, Tripoli, rooms meant for perhaps twenty people are commonly filled with one hundred. These men, women and children have come from as far as Eritrea and Ethiopia. They risk their lives along desert smuggling routes lined with bandits and other dangers.
But Libya was also a place rich in opportunities for those with an appetite for danger. A huge oil exporting nation, a major military power in Africa, a playground for spies, the prospect of some work there tantalized Kilian. Marcelek arrives for lunch. He's all Polish.
They got a little bit jealous.
While the sky is bier de mere and he is good looking, and he is well dressed. Everything he has smells money and care and everything is perfect.
And I come with my cheap trousers and whatnot.
A little envy prompts some German Austrian rivalry.
Well, there's a typical Austrian sort of showing off person. I've seen many of those in Vienna.
Over lunch, the conversation becomes competitive, what.
They call alas the male cockfight. In the beginning, they try to impress the other one of how cool you are and how tough you are, and where you have been and so on.
This is you and Marcelec.
You know how two cocks are when they're showing the nice feathers and so on.
Killian tells Marcelec stories. He recounts the dangerous, violent and volatile situations he has lived in around the world. But Marcelek is not to be outdone.
And then very fast actually he started then talking about his experience in Syria, facilitated by the boys. Just after the recapture of the city of Panira from Isis.
When he said, with the boys, what did you now?
He basically said, with the Russians.
Marcelek tells Killian that he arrived in Syria in a migate. He describes how the helicopter banked and turned, and with a blast of dry hot air through the open door, he looked down on the vast ruins of Roman Palmyra below. He was the guest of the head of intelligence for the Wagner Group, Russia's most notorious mercenary army. They didn't linger, Marcelex said it was too dangerous, but there was time
for some photos. I've seen those photos. There's a hastily snapped selfie in front of the amphitheater, and another shot in in front of a burned out tank, and one of him aiming a bazooka. In all of them, Marcelek is posing basically in body armor and sometimes wearing dark blue aviators. To me, he seems almost boyishly excited. What's remarkable is that Marcelek's story, all this boasting about being in Syria didn't strike Killian as unusual at the time.
But Killian is not a very usual kind of person.
It didn't click in my head that it's a bit strange that a payment provider would be going into such an area.
If it had clicked, maybe he could have avoided what happened next. I can only assume Killian wasn't taken aback because of the way Marcelek framed the story. He told Killian that when he saw war ravage Syria for himself, he realized he wanted to stop that kind of thing from happening elsewhere, like in Libya. Marcelett convinced Killian that he wanted to make a difference to make the world
a better place. As Killian understood it, Marcelett wanted to commission a development plan, a blueprint for how to end lawlessness on Libya's southern border where there was no government control.
He spoke about the gold mines at the border to Chat where people have to work for two years to get their passage to Europe paid off. He spoke about the guys sitting in Monaco and being the people behind the whole business, that they were earning one hundred dollars per person crossing into Europe. He displayed sort of a more emotional something has to be done to stop out of that.
And maybe I felt that he was genuine in that.
Somehow he sounds quite impressive.
It didn't click as sort of a police ploid at that moment. It felt more, Yes, I want to do something. I want to contribute, so I will put two hundred thousand euros into your Killian and your team so that there should be collateral financing to have a full plan of what to do with Libya so that this doesn't happen.
Killian came away from his first lunch with Jan Marsleg feeling good about his new project and his new client. He built a team and he got to work doing research and making plans to pull together a kind of feasibility study on how to bring law and order to the region and improve the lives of the people living there, who to speak to and what to say to them. But it wasn't long before there were signs that not
all was as it seemed. Killian had been told that he could trust Marcelec's handshake and that Marcelec wouldn't sign a contract anyway, so there wasn't much Killian could do about what happened next.
Then no money. There was no payment for me.
I mean, did it not strike you as odd that there's this. There's this wealthy backer who has money and he's just not not paying.
Yes, of course, I said, what's this? I mean, you told me it's undshake quality. Finally engaged with our the contracts. Should have never done this, big mistake.
At this point, Killian is still dealing with marcele X through an intermediary marcele X's lobbyist in Vienna, and after a lot of pestering about the missing finance, the intermediary gives him a very strange answer. He says, send your invoice to the Libyan Russian Institute in Moscow, which is odd because no such institute even seems to exist there.
There's more. When Killian suggests that they should organize a trip to Libya so he can talk to his backer about his plans and show him how they might work on the ground. He gets told this will also be arranged, but from Moscow.
The trip will be organized by Colonel tribly Gin under the Triblean in Moscow. So who was colonel and the Triblegian, Oh, here's the coordinator of Russian interests in Northern Africa and the Middle East.
By now I'm thinking for almost anyone, the jig would be up. Whatever this project was, it was not simply some idea from an Austrian businessman with a good heart and an open checkbook. Killian, though, still didn't pull the plug, maybe because at this point he's already paid his team a considerable amount of money from his own pocket, and he's really quite proud of the work they've done, the
study they've begun to produce. So he needs to sort things out one way or the other, and the only way to do that is to demand another face to face meeting with Mas. And that's how. In February twenty eighteen, Killian finds himself standing on a street corner in a wealthy district of Munich. On the opposite side of the street is the Russian Consulate. He's waiting directly outside a grand, four story Grundadzite nineteenth century villa.
One of these big mansions will find in Vienna, you will find in Munich, you will find in all the century of European cities where very wealthy business families built us.
At some point, it's so big he struggles to figure out how to get in. There doesn't seem to be a doorbell when.
Somehow the doors of the villa they open mysteriously.
This is Jan Marcelek's house and personal office. Marcelect meets Killian, who is with a colleague on the first floor. There's some impressive contemporary art on the walls, but not a lot tells.
Normal people when they live in a place, there is always some crap lying around. I mean it's a place where we kind of live. And when I come into place like that and it feels like it's like a showroom, it's nothing personal.
They enter a capacious meeting room. There's a spread of coffee, juices and biscuits. They make small talk and then they get down to business, but it doesn't go well.
Marsidic was visibly bored.
He sort of treated as little boys who come up with ridiculous, humilitanian crap. Basically said, this was all child's stuff, children's stuff, This is too small. I was thinking big projects, big industries.
I mean, basically dismissed what we had done.
But Marceilllek is excited about something else. He's got a video he wants to show Killian.
I have in German as a guile, I mean exciting a video material.
Gile in this context, I think you'd probably best translators. Sexy cool. Marcelex seems pretty psyched up about it. It's a video filmed using some new military equipment, body cams worn by soldiers, bodycams worn by Wagner the Russian Mercenary Army. Marceilek is interested in getting some of these cameras for his own purposes. He boasts to Killian that the content of the video is shocking.
Can show it because the boys are killing all the prisoners, So it can be used in public.
Because it's the video is graphic footage of people being murdered.
Yes, but it's great footage, and so it's pretty basically we can show it.
And I sort of Butt's talked about all this after the meeting.
What were you thinking when he was saying that.
Or should there's something going on here?
Killian finally begins to understand that this humanitarian project is not at all what it seems. Trying to move things on from the video, Killian asks how this relates to their work. The answer chills Killian. He says, Marcelett told him.
What I want really is to convert militia men into borderguards. Fifteen twenty thousand something big, and we train and equip them.
And sid he wants to create a military force in Libya, a border guard that would stop migrants crossing into or out of Libya. He wants to equip it, and fund it and control it.
That was sort of a key moment where it said there's something very wrong.
Afterwards, Killian replayed that meeting over and over in his head. He asked himself, who is Jan Marcelek?
Really?
He couldn't come up with a clear answer, and perhaps since his invoices were still open, he didn't want to. But there was something about the whole situation which made him think that Marcelek might not just be a wealthy fantasist, that he might be serious about these proposals, and he might even have the means to achieve them. He tried to ignore that feeling until he couldn't.
It really sort of clicked completely later that year, October November.
That's when Killian bumped into a military contact who had also been working on the side with Marceilek.
He tells him, Killian, you know, with Jan one cannot work. He's too close to the Russians.
So from that point onward, yes, and that's late twenty eighteen. Here I am with something that I knowed that is a lot more to the whole story.
Killian Kleinschmidt knows he has potentially explosive information about jan Marcelek, but Killian also knows he has to be careful. He knows Austria well enough now enough to know that Marcelek, while somewhat in the shadows, seems to be extremely well connected. Months go by, and then in the summer of twenty nineteen, Killian sees an opportunity to raise the alarm. He's in Tunis and he's invited to a garden party at the residence of the Austrian ambassador to Libya who's based there.
He grabs a few minutes with the host and.
I explained to him the story an Austrian national very much doing strange things and Libya and whether there was on the radar screen and so on. And when I had finished the story, and he said, how you have to be careful.
It could be one of them.
You have to be careful. I could be one of them. Even though this sounds ominous. When I first heard this, I took it as a joke. And the ambassador confirmed as much to me. He told me he remembers meeting Killian but doesn't recall exactly what he said, and that making joking remarks sounds like something he'd probably do just to try and break the ice. He wanted to make clear though, that he didn't and doesn't have a connection
to Marcelek regardless. Back then, at this party, Killian is already feeling nervous and gets the impression he should hold his tongue, an impression reinforced when a year later, at the same garden party, the ambassador joked again.
That's when he's said in front of other people and saying it, Oh, that's Kleinschmidt. Yeah, I have the instruction to not let you out alife. So obviously humor, but it was as well kind of menacing, kind of immature.
I mean, even though it was a joke, there is a slight message there for you, isn't there. He's trying to tell you something, which is maybe that you're annoying or maybe you should shut up.
But basically yes.
So from then on, Killian only speaks to one or two close friends about Marcelek. He worries that if he tells anyone who knows him less well, he might land himself in serious trouble or end up sounding like well, a bit cracked, another unpaid contractor with an ax to grind and a conspiracy to pedal but other events at the time, they keep making him a question again and again, just what was Marcelek up to. A few months after Killian broke off his connection with mars Leg, he moved
to northern Greece. The borders were closed. Huge numbers of migrants were trying to come into Europe from the Levante due to the war raging in Syria. Even though Killian's officially retired from the UN he'd remained plugged in. Thanks to Killian's years of frontline work. His network of sources bring him disturbing nuggets of information about the situation. They tell him, even though the borders are closed, it seems that over and over again, desperate groups of migrants believe otherwise.
They're being fed lies.
Through my network, we found out that somehow there were rumors spread that Merkel would open the borders again.
Angela Merkel, Germany's chancellor. At the time, she had already accepted hundreds of thousands of migrants into Germany.
We've found very strong indications in photos of people who were in different locations telling that story. And this story of it went from northern Iraq, and it was in Turkey, it was in the entire region, the sort of go Europe.
Telling that story to refugees and camps.
And camps and out of camps already on the move, already in Greece and so on. So people have started moving in this direction.
Hospitals are being bombed in Syria at the time by the Russians who are fighting alongside their client Basha Asad, the country's ruler. They seem to be deliberately worsening the humanitarian crisis, and something for Killian falls into place. What if the Russians are spreading these lies about open borders in Europe too? He makes the leap back to Marsilek. What if Marsilek wanted to do something similar in southern Libya, to use a force controlling the border to influence migrant flows.
At first, it all feels too outlandish to him, but with time he starts to believe it. For the most part, though, he keeps all these suspicions to himself now to fear, until the day he spoke to me. When Gillian told it to me, it rang Bells. I thought straight away of the late US Senator John McCain. He'd said the very same thing in twenty sixteen at the Munich Security Conference with reference to Syria.
Mister Putin is not interested in being our partner. He wants to shore up the Asad regime. He wants to re establish Russia as a major power in the Middle East. He wants to use Syria as a live fire exercise for Russia's modernizing military, and he wants to exacerbate the refugee crisis and use it as a weapon to divide the Transit Plantic Alliance and undermine the European Project.
Russia's interest in weaponizing migration was being taken seriously as a threat to NATO by the world's biggest military power, the USA. So this idea of Killians that marsilect could be working for Russia in Libya to control migration for political influence, it's actually not as far fetched as it seems. Then, six months after I first met Killian in June twenty twenty, something.
Happened extraordinary story admission, of course, from payments for wirecard this week that the missing two billion dollars may never have existed at all.
After months of tireless reporting by my colleague at the FT, Dan McCrumb Wirecard, the fintech giant Marcelect had helped build as chief operating officer, the corporate edifice around which he had constructed his entire public persona collapsed. Meanwhile, Wire Cards auditors are in hot water too.
E Y says a two point one billion dollar hole in the firm's accounts is the result of sophisticated fraud.
Now Marcus Brown, of course has resigned or has we done? On Friday as the CEO of that company.
The chief operating officer was also sacked over the weekend.
Once our card exploded, some of the other people involved in marcelex Libya scheme they became more talkative, and within well just four weeks or so, Killian's crazy tale went from being an unprintable conspiracy to an established set of facts we could attribute to multiple sources. But I wanted to be certain we weren't overinterpreting marcle X's links to Russian intelligence, so I went with what we knew to one of my most important contacts, I can't really tell
you about them. That's a condition of me being in touch with them. But they work for a European government. Let's leave it there. They confirmed what I thought, Marceleck really did have ties to Russian spies. Specifically, it seemed to the GRU, Russia's fearsome military intelligence agency, the organization responsible for the Salisbury poisonings. Killian decided he wanted to go public. He outed himself and gave testimony to a
special committee of the German Parliament investigating Wakaart. Killian doesn't regret doing that, but he's also over time become more and more convinced that he was right to be afraid. His life has never quite been the same. Twice now he's been on the edge of financial ruin thanks to projects he's gotten involved in which have exploded in his face. And he doesn't think it's a coincidence.
It may not be sort of the extreme sort of movie style revenge, but it may be a sort of destroy option of guiding me and leading me into traps, which is very intelligent if you want to make somebody suffer. I was promised things which never happened, and so almost by design, and it led to one of the most horrible years in my life and being completely destitute.
In fact, even now he struggles. He keeps being approached by odd characters, people connected to Russia, who seemed to be trying to lure him into misadventures. For all his experience, his bravery, and his force of personality, Killian still ended up vulnerable. What Killian revealed about Marcelek was it still is wild. But it wasn't the end of the story at all. It was really just the beginning. It was a revelation that triggered as many questions as it answered.
Was marcelect working exclusively for the Russians? Was he a kind of freelancer? Did the wire card fraud involve Russia too? What did Russia want from Marcelek? The obvious person to ask, of course, was Marcelec himself, except we couldn't. On June seventeenth, twenty twenty, with Warkard's management, employees and shareholders still reeling from the fact that billions were missing, Jan Marcelek told colleagues he was urgently flying to Manila, where the money
was supposed to have disappeared. He said he was going to sort out the mystery and prove Warkard had nothing to hide except in reality. He was in a car heading across the Alps. It was a beautiful day, hot, a clear blue sky, perfect weather to fly. Pad Verslau Airport is a small regional airstrip in Austria used mostly by amateur aviators. A car pulled up on the tarmac that day and outstepped Jan Marcelek. The border checks were a formality. No one was really watching down there. Marceleck
had a suitcase with him. It was full of cash. Here's you're fair, he must have told the pilot, next stop, Minsk, Belarus, coming up on hot money. The people who were left behind trying to make sense of it.
All, and we walked around and unbelievable. You walk around and you see a parallel world and all the explanation he had. This room is sound proof. This room is got searched every other week by a specialist for microphones and surveillance stuff.
We were flabberg acid, We were speechless.
It had never happened like that.
I mean, we were all important people in the company that it.
Was like a persona face. The top ten white collar crime of Theory.
Minas and Financier from Lubishop Vad and Me.
Hot Money is a production of The Financial Times and Pushkin Industries. It was written and reported by me Sam Jones. The senior producer and co writer is Peggy Sutton. Our producer is Izzy Carter. Our researcher is Marine Saint. Our show is edited by Karen Shakerji, fact checking by Kira Levigne. Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorsky and Marcelo de Olivia, with additional sound design by Izy Carter. Original music from Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphonet. Our show
art is by Sean Carney. Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley, Amy Gains McQuaid and Matthew Garreher. Additional editing by Paul Murphy. Special thanks to Ruler Claugh, Dan McCrumb, Laura Clark, Alistair Mackie, Manuela Saragosa, Nigel Hanson, Vicki Merrick, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Jake Flanagan, Jacob Goldstein, Sarah Nix and Greta Cohne. I'm Sam Jones.