Födisch sticks to his account. The witness had claimed to know Dr Braun personally. Braun reaches for the microphone and laughs. He does not know the man. He let his lawyer go on explaining.

Then came the question the morning had been built around. Would the defence withdraw its announced further motion to hear the witness who had not come? The answer arrived with a small laugh into the microphone: absolutely not. Least of all because a man one cannot reach wrongly believes he knows Dr Braun. Födisch pointed out that the proceedings might then be delayed, that further dates would be needed, and that this would not be in the client's interest. After six years of pre-trial detention, the chamber's continued performance of concern for the client's calendar is somehow almost touching. If one did not have entirely different reasons for it.

Ten minutes, roughly

Straight away, at 9.45, the court rose. Ten minutes' break. Something had to be printed. The judges withdrew. At 10.20 they were back. In Stadelheim a minute is an elastic unit, closer to the geology of tectonic plates than to an actual clock.

What followed was the 2019 Christmas programme of precisely that Irish corporate contraption whose witness had, at short notice, gone full blockade. An English interpreter was sworn in. Judge and interpreter then took turns reading sheets 183 to 186 of case file II-1. This is how one turns a file reference into a radio play in this room. The subject was a brokerage agreement between Wirecard UK & Ireland and a party called Ruprecht.

On 18 December 2019 Dagmar Schneider wrote to Alan White. Attached, the agreement and the board resolution. Also, ten million euros had gone to Ruprecht that same day, as the contract required and the board had approved. The loan agreement itself did not yet exist. They had only noticed its absence that morning. The money had in the meantime been transferred on loan. Could someone please draw the contract up. The reply from the inner circle was a model of corporate governance: small circle, please, and quietly.

Who, someone asks at one point in the email chain, actually manages all this? Answer: Oliver. Meaning the Munich prosecution's crown witness, Oliver Bellenhaus.

Merry Christmas, thirty million

The interpreter still had a few more emails. On 27 December, with Jan Marsalek in copy, someone hoped for a merry Christmas and mentioned, in the same breath, that a further 30 million euros had gone to Ruprecht as additional security. The business of Al-Alam in Dubai, where Oliver Bellenhaus was managing director, was being transferred to Ruprecht. Everyone at Wirecard had agreed. The loan agreement would follow shortly. On 30 December Alan White wrote back, grateful, and asked a small question about the new loan. Three months, six months, two years? Volumes with Al-Alam, Oliver Bellenhaus still managing director there, were going to shrink, which apparently meant larger sums would be needed. And what about Citadelle, White asked, the trustee at the time of the still missing 1.9 billion euros.



Judge Födisch follows up. A request the chamber sent towards Singapore in 2023, he notes, still has no answer. The matter sits with the thoroughly Munich public prosecutor Lemmers, and this is how she dealt with it. There is an order of hers on the point, dated 28 January 2026. Singapore, seat of the trustee who for a long time sat on the non-existent-existing 1.9 billion, was and remains a slow postal district. About as slow as the witness from England who, a few days ago, apparently fled into the sauna.

Then the next pause. Thirty minutes this time, and announced as such, which almost counted as punctuality.

She picked up

After the break the defence read out its new motion, and the morning finally acquired a real point. The point has a name. Brigitte Häuser-Axtner, for years the woman at Wirecard's Asia desk, whom Munich so persistently preferred not to hear at all, was flat out on the weekend of the collapse. Merchant after merchant was on the line. She answered the requests without a pause, the whole weekend, the office on alert. On Monday morning she went to sit down and carry on, only to find that her access to the computer had suddenly been blocked.

One rubs one's eyes, although by now one really ought to stop. For years the prosecution and the great chorus of the official Wirecard story have rested on one gigantic ghost: the merchants tied to the TPA business who never got in touch. Supposedly no complaint, no call, no unsettled trader wanting to know where the settlements had gone. Silence counted as proof of absence. Whoever does not knock was never there, so the third-party business was pure air. That is the narrative of the indictment. Asked why the absence of any report counted as an indication, the answer on the file was almost touching. One would have expected a complaint. On 6 August 2025 Lemmers put it roughly like this: with a proper understanding of the TPA structure, a disruption of payments would have produced claims by the creditors. Since there never were any such claims, there can have been no third-party business either.

Häuser-Axtner's account, read out by Dr Braun's defence, says that people did not merely knock. They knocked in quantity. On the weekend Wirecard went down, and at a very short list of people in the building: Jan Marsalek, Oliver Bellenhaus and Häuser-Axtner herself. She did not spend those two days waiting for a complaint that never came. She spent them answering the complaints. On Monday someone, or something, switched her off. The Koblenz prosecution stands as the bearer of the evidence on this part of the file, minuted after Häuser-Axtner had been arrested and questioned through the work done in Koblenz.

So the merchant who never called had quite a full weekend. This is not a nuance. It is, properly speaking, the overturn of the story.

Three points around a ghost

The rest of the motion is built around that ghost. The chamber's decision to keep Braun in detention was taken, the defence went on, before the taking of evidence had finished. The existence of the TPA business is not a side matter. It is the matter. The same accounts, the same statements, the same behaviour mean one thing if a real business lay underneath, and something else entirely if it did not. Judging from indications, while refusing to settle that question, is how this trial has learned to read the clock.

Beside that she set out three points.

First, the prosecution has still produced no real proof, of the kind that will bear weight, that Dr Braun took part in a fraud. The claim that he belonged to the group that committed it rests solely on crown witness Oliver Bellenhaus. Whether Bellenhaus takes this from his own work, or projects it onto Braun, remains entirely open. The defence says he lied in order to protect himself and to enrich himself. Confrontational questioning on the point has been refused throughout, by Bellenhaus and by the lawyer at his side.

Second, neither the court nor the defence knows what actually happened. They know what Bellenhaus believes. The crown witness's many contradictions are not slips. They are the statements that exonerate Braun.

Third, there is no objective proof that Braun knew of a fraud. Every conclusion the chamber draws can therefore only be an indication. Money that was not sitting in the named accounts is not money that never existed. Trust confirmations may very well have existed. An overstated balance sheet requires, as a small preliminary, an overstatement. Calling credit balances "objectively worthless" because nothing moved on them is a slogan, not a sum.

And then the motive the indictment has never quite looked in the eye. Had the TPA business been real and then collapsed, the loss would have been real too. Braun personally held 7 per cent of it, a share the defence put at 133 million euros, plus property and a bank loan pledged to that same future. Braun had, in short, an expensive reason to stop a loss. The charge is that he did not intervene, and knowingly swallowed the loss, or even helped carry it. An assessment of the evidence that leaves out this contradiction has mislaid ordinary logic. As long as the question of the TPA business stays open, fraudulent intent is not made out.

The prosecution called the payment flows money laundering without setting out the proof. The insolvency administrator takes the view that the TPA business does not exist, and the prosecution is happy to lean on his findings. A first serious look at the flows themselves, the defence said, citing among others the statements of Braun's successor and interim chief executive James Freis, never took place. The merchants were not warned, neither before the insolvency nor after it. They called all the same, as one now knows thanks to Koblenz.

79 pages, to be read in silence

At 12.08 the reading broke off. Defence counsel had delivered the preface of the long motion in full, in court.

The chamber placed the evidentiary motion of 11 November 2026 on the file. The brief itself, dated 12 November, runs to 79 pages. It is to be introduced by self-reading. That is the court's polite way of saying that nobody in the room has to hear it out loud. Efficient, in its fashion. The ten-minute break had already shown what this room most likes to do with time.

Födisch, and the by now somewhat chalk-pale row of judges, look ahead. Tomorrow, one ruling, or two. Perhaps the witness will turn up after all, though he does not answer the phone, the presiding judge guessed.

Almost pleading, the question put at once to crown witness Bellenhaus: "You will surely still have something to say about all of this tomorrow, won't you?" He had no interest in stretching the hearing by further months on account of the new motion.

All the same, the courtroom was already doing the arithmetic. Further dates may yet be added. After Christmas, if it has to be.