Jan Marcelek was a model of modern German corporate success. It seemed so damned simple for him, young, wealthy, charismatic. Did it occur to you that he'd charmed you in any way? Yes? It did that he was a charming man. It turned out he was also a fraudster. Where does the money come from? That was something that I always was questioning myself. Someone living another life. His secret office was a lesson for I verund meters down the road.
I'm Sam Jones and I'm the European security correspondent for the Financial Times. In twenty twenty, my colleagues at the FT exposed German financial payments giant WAKAD as a huge corporate con But it was also the start of a strange and more elusive tale. One cannot work with Macelech. He has too close to the rast.
It looks like the ingredients of a really grand spy story. Because this ties together the cold or alms the new one.
For the last year, I've been pulling together threads from the wreckage Jan Marcelect left behind. He disappeared just hours before Wakad's final moments and took plundered millions with him. I've met people who were drawn into his world. I envied Ian so much, only for their lives to be turned upside down.
You do start to.
Worry what you've sort of brought down on your family.
I don't know if they've followed me to my home. Certain things in my life since then have done terribly wrong.
Then I think this can't be a coincidence. I've traced Marcelet's path from glamorous parties along the Courtezieu with his mysterious Russian lover, to the front lines of the War on Terror, snapping selfies with Russian mercenaries in Syria and Libya of conspiracies aimed at furthering the power of the far right. He definitely has a view that he's operating with complete freedom to do whatever he likes. I've tried
to understand why mars electrose this path. I think the biggest tragedy of Jan Marsalek is.
That he didn't need to be what he turned out to be.
What it's all for, I.
Would say that we are actually at the doorstep of a new ideological war, and people are choosing their sides in.
This struggle, and who he really is.
I often ask myself, now, did I know the true Yan at all?
This is a story about the underside of the law abiding world that most of us imagine. We live in, a space carved out by crime and corruption, a world some people find irresistible. It all began with an attempt to catch a white collar fraudster, but it ended up exposing something more sinister espionage from the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries Hot Money Season three, Agent of Chaos, coming June tenth. Listen to Hot Money Agent of Chaos wherever
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