In mid-January 2025, the palour courtroom in Munich's Stadelheim Prison was apparently inspired by the origins of table tennis when a former Wirecard prosecutor was questioned on January 15 and 16, 2025. The criminal proceedings against three former Wirecard bosses have been running there since December 2022, and it was recently decided in the aristocratic backrooms of the Bavarian judiciary to continue the proceedings until at least the end of 2025.

A few days earlier, the presiding judge at the Munich Regional Court, who had previously worked under the long-serving Munich public prosecutor Hildegard Bäumler-Hösl, had agreed to question a former younger public prosecutor named Heinen, who had also previously worked under Bäumler-Hösl, about the fundamentally important transcripts of co-defendant Oliver Bellenhaus from July 15 and August 10, 2020. Instead of playing table tennis with books, as British colonialists did in the 1870s, the approximately 200-page transcripts of Oliver Bellenhaus' interrogations from that time were evidently used. Interrupted by an extremely revealing questioning of COO Jacob Powers of a major payment provider called CCBill, who was brought into the courtroom via video from Phoenix, Arizona, the two days of questioning were devoted exclusively to the former Wirecard prosecutor. Heinen was recently appointed as a judge at the very same court where presiding Wirecard judge Födisch sits: the Munich Regional Court. Hidden behind hours of very serious judicial questioning in a pyramid-like order, the rather background career information on the now two judges of the Regional Court and former Wirecard prosecutors was probably intended to conceal what was obvious from the outset: a bizarre ping-pong of questioning judiciary colleagues.

The hearing transcripts from July 15 and August 20, 2020 are of enormous importance for the criminal proceedings and act as a blueprint for the entire indictment of the public prosecutor's office. Oliver Bellenhaus had been sent to prison days earlier and arrived at the Munich public prosecutor's office in prison clothing after his very first detention experiences. Heinen begins his statements on January 15, 2025, right at the beginning with, quote: "I remember well, it was very hot in the summer at that time, Mr. Bellenhaus was also extremely heated up, we had offered him to take a shower in the facilities of the public prosecutor's office".

Regarding the mysterious 20-minute pause between the official start of the hearing at 9 a.m. and the, quote, "functioning of the audio recording", which can be read in the minutes of July 15, 2020 by anyone, it was determined in a skillful ping-pong theatricality that everything was totally fine back then - the technician had "simply had his problems with the equipment". Heinen stated he had never heard that Wirecard's chief prosecutor Hildegard Bäumler-Hösl had met with Oliver Bellenhaus' lawyer for 20 minutes to discuss a crown witness deal informally upfront. Which is somewhat surprising, because one of the first recorded sentences in the transcript from July 15, 2020 shows that Hildegard Bäumler-Hösl stated, quote: "Don't worry, we have already done(!) the Siemens procedure here in the department". Even more, Bellenhaus was apparently not really officially read out his rights in full at 9 a.m., he was "somehow made aware of this beforehand". Bellenhaus was asked in court and nodded, stating he had been "informed of his rights the night before".

While the two judges continue their hour-long parlor ping-pong, they seem to try to hypnotize the audience with seemingly endless back-and-forth games. No one really dares to ask questions in between, or has been so passive-aggressively psychologically abused by the way the trial has been conducted for months that it seems much better to continue suppressing the more than justified emotional outbursts. The questioning itself is already a scandal, the presiding judge literally goes through the 200 pages of documents paragraph by paragraph, first asking Heinen if he remembers the relevant facts in general, then allowing the witness to explain them in detail. In 99% of the cases, the judge then mentally pats Heinen and confirms in a collegial manner by reading out the relevant transcript paragraph more or less in its entirety.

This goes on for hours, from the MCA business in Turkey and Brazil, Crusty in the Philippines, the XPay platform, Softbank's capital increase, Ruprecht, Vision 2025, Wirecard Bank's investments in Lebanon, to Oliver Bellenhaus' shock reaction when he first learned about the yearly salary of chief accountant Erffa. One of the ping-pong highlights surfaced when talking about how Oliver Bellenhaus explained back in July 2020 that instead of real-time transactions, only delayed batch payment transactions were used for one of EY's audits. Not only was EY apparently in full agreement with this, but also with subsequent static screenshots for these Wirecard payment proofs. Yet the presiding judge closed the relevant paragraph of the transcripts with, quote, "EY was deceived".

The fact that the Munich public prosecutor's key witness, Oliver Bellenhaus, had declared "about 10% of all private meals as business meals" during his entire time at Wirecard was just as elegantly skated over as the fact that Bellenhaus had stated that he had allegedly been severely disadvantaged by the usual 4% annual salary increases of all other Wirecard employees. Perhaps it was because the credibility of the key witness Bellenhaus had to be preserved at all costs when a day later, at the very end of the two-day hearing on the all-important transcripts from mid-2020, a money laundering report from Germany's Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) dated July 15, 2020 was thrown onto the court projector - the exact same day Bellenhaus was made crown witness back then. The presiding judge showed only the top part of this FIU report, which was addressed to Munich's Criminal Investigation Department 72. An apparently inadvertent millisecond of screen scrolling by the judge revealed to experienced observers that it had also been forwarded to the Munich public prosecutor's office, however, who interviewed Bellenhaus at the exact same moment that July 15, 2020. That FIU report concerned Oliver Bellenhaus' own Levantine Foundation in Liechtenstein, where money laundering payments had been flagged. The FIU report "was kind of filed away", Heinen says in a nutshell.

The legal ping-pong game continued, from crown-witness claims of the "Aslam money destruction project" to a lack of employees in Dubai and therefore alleged lack of sales revenues. Repeated attempts were made here once again to claim that the entire Wirecard company was a sham. The judge never tires of suggesting, no matter how absurdly, that more or less all of the company's sales were fabricated, despite motions for evidence to the contrary.

The fact that Stadelheim is not particularly interested in shedding light on the core of the scandal became even clearer when only very briefly mentioning, quote, "Manu Sahu was the chief programmer", who had originally also programmed Wirecard's popular Elastic Engine software. Although chief accountant von Erffa had clearly stated in the months before that he had no friendly contact with Oliver Bellenhaus whatsoever, but rather the opposite, the key witness apparently stated quite convincingly for the Munich public prosecutor in July 2020, quote, "von Erffa and I always agreed on the figures of the third-party partner business, the figures were falsified" ; further that the chief accountant stated to Oliver Bellenhaus at the beginning of 2020 very allegedly: "if you quit, I quit, too". Only to explain a little later in the same transcripts from July 2020 that everyone had been invited to Oliver Bellenhaus' wedding, except for super-colleague-friend and chief accountant Stephan von Erffa himself.

Apparently, God spoke with a clear sign in the late afternoon of the first of the two testimony days, when more or less all of the presiding judges' screens went completely blank for a few minutes for inexplicable reasons. In reversing God's will however, the next hearing day continued with a series of attacks on Dr. Markus Braun, who allegedly had "countless conversations with Oliver Bellenhaus about the TPA figures" and did not shy away from the mega-cumbersome up-and-down pilgrimage through the emergency exit and around half of the company headquarters in order to "constantly appear in Jan Marsalek's office" and discuss the third-party partner numbers there.


After all, Oliver Bellenhaus also stated in another interrogation minutes from August 10, 2020 that, quote, "Wirecard had been plundered". Probably a bit like spectators at endless, breathtaking ping-pong matches, where one tends to ignore one's own wallet for way too long.