As the Wirecard trial in Munich nears its verdict, former CEO Markus Braun has given his first substantial interview from pre-trial detention. Der Spiegel published the conversation, held at Munich’s Stadelheim prison. For a man who once ran a DAX company and rarely let anyone see behind the facade, it is a remarkable document. Read carefully, it leaves one clear impression: this is a man the experience has broken, however much he insists otherwise.


Braun has now spent more than six years in pre-trial detention (Untersuchungshaft). He calls the early period, above all the first two and a half years at the JVA Augsburg-Gablingen prison, an “absolute extreme situation.” He describes an 8 m² security cell under constant video surveillance, where he was locked in for 21 to 23 hours a day during the pandemic. He speaks of “massive darkness” and of the danger of losing oneself, yet claims he kept a “strong core.” He talks about his daughter, who was two when he was arrested and is eight today, and about the long struggle to come to terms with his feelings toward Jan Marsalek, the former Wirecard executive who fled in 2020 and has never stood trial. He calls the trial a farce and the length of his detention unjustified.

The conditions he describes are anything but abstract. A court has now opened the main trial against 13 former JVA Augsburg-Gablingen staff members, including the former director and her deputy, over 131 alleged offences against 102 prisoners between January 2023 and October 2024, among them dangerous bodily harm in office, unlawful imprisonment and coercion. Prisoners were allegedly beaten, choked and left naked for long periods in bare “specially secured cells,” isolation cells meant only for acute danger but used routinely as punishment, and staff chats speak of “destroying” inmates. Former Federal Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger calls it the largest prison scandal in the history of the Federal Republic. Braun was held in Gablingen even before the period under indictment, at a time when the abuse was apparently already going on and no cleanup had even begun, let alone indictments against the prison’s leadership. That gives his “absolute extreme situation” real weight.

What puzzles me is the tone. I have covered Wirecard since February 2021, when my first article on the case, Bavariacard, appeared. Since the very first hearing day in December 2022, I have attended nearly 40 trial days in the Stadelheim courtroom and reported on them in detail at Sun24 Press. After six years in these places, in Stadelheim and in Gablingen, Braun sounds almost as if it were somehow acceptable to be held this long and this disproportionately. There is little anger in his words and even less accusation. Perhaps that is simply how Der Spiegel chose to frame the conversation. Either way, the reader comes away thinking the conditions were bearable. They were not.

Detention takes away one of the most basic human needs: the freedom to move. The risk of suicide is not theoretical. It sets in at once and stays, whether or not a person was ever at risk before. Even the “strongest core” simply does not change that, unless one’s own freedom never really mattered all that much. Pre-trial detention is meant to secure a trial, not to punish before a verdict. After six years, that line has all but disappeared.

What Braun says about Marsalek is equally hard to take seriously. In hindsight, he says, he should have thrown him out ten years earlier, and if he ever saw him again, all he would ask is: “Why! Why!” He claims he simply cannot understand why Marsalek staged “this madness” and would like to find out his real motives. By now Braun must know that Marsalek was operating not only for the Russians but also for the CIA. Even the Financial Times admitted as much in its Hot Money podcast, as I described in The Uncles’ CIA Rogue Fixer.

Asked what he will do once he is out, Braun speaks of time with his family in Vienna and of wanting to build something again. What interests him? Artificial intelligence, “one of the most exciting topics of our time,” and technology in general, from AI to quantum computers, fusion energy and space. And the justice system that has held him for six years without a verdict? Pre-trial detention, he suggests, should be capped at about one year and the length of proceedings limited to, say, 50 days, “but that would be a matter for politics.” After a nearly four-year crucifixion in the Stadelheim courtroom, I find that laughable. If the man who lived through this does not push for a judicial cleanup, who will? Whoever leaves this to “the politics,” which is at times partly responsible for the theatrical comedy in Stadelheim, ultimately has no interest in making sure others are spared the same fate.

Even after all this time, Braun remains, at least in his dealings with the media, what he always was: a man focused on his image. He still seems to want, even need, to leave the right impression among salon radicals at dinner parties and in golf clubhouses. The proceedings against him, now nearly four years long, are not just a farce. They are a gigantic scandal. You can read my free eBook about the whole affair, The Wirecard Implosion – Anatomy of a Judiciary Disaster.


The book follows the case from the video conference of 18 June 2020 to the Munich courtroom in Stadelheim, where I sat in the back row through countless sessions. It shows how the defense uncovered roughly two billion euros in traceable flows through Switzerland and Hong Kong right up to the insolvency, how the prosecutors screamed into their microphones to drown out that evidence, and how the court rejected one motion after another until the official narrative imploded in open court.

At the end of 2024, I spoke briefly with a close relative of Braun’s and urged them to start a public campaign without delay. A man held for years without a verdict needs voices outside the walls. Those closest to him rejected the idea then and still do, apparently so that a certain image stays intact among the salon radicals in Vienna as well. That silence helps a justice system in Munich and Bavaria that largely does as it pleases - and for which the presiding Bavarian judge may very well be promoted, so it seems.

After reading the interview several times, I know the first thing I would wish Braun, if he is finally released: thorough therapy. Then again, perhaps that impression, too, is only how Der Spiegel wrote it all down.






Photos via Wikimedia Commons: Stadelheim wall and tower by Rufus46 (CC BY-SA 4.0), Wirecard headquarters by Leo Molatore (CC BY-SA 2.0), Augsburg-Gablingen prison by Tobias Maier (CC BY-SA 3.0), Stadelheim aerial view by Carsten Steger (CC BY-SA 4.0), Spiegel building by Dennis Siebert (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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