Dr. Rainer Thiede wipes his forehead. His fingers drum nervously on the witness stand table. "Uh… I wasn't involved in that," stammered the KPMG partner for the third time in ten minutes. Judge Födisch stares him down: "Doctor Thiede, you can't be serious. We're talking about billions here."  The courtroom goes silent. What happened that day in Munich's Wirecard trial was more than just testimony: it was an audit disaster on full display.

"I Don't Remember": The Convenient Amnesia

When the judge asked about key details, Thiede said "I don't remember,"  "no recollection,"  or "I wasn't involved"  nearly 30 times. Like when asked who the TPA contact people were (Marsalek, Bellenhaus, Ms. Schneider) or about contract documents: "Some were signed wrong, different versions — lots of question marks."  Asked about merchant contracts — crucial for tracking transactions — he came out with: "Maybe… uh… I wasn't involved in that!"  Board meeting notes? Missing. "Of course they should exist,"  Thiede said, but couldn't say why Wirecard wouldn't hand them over.

Thiede, who in 2019/2020 ran the forensic investigation into Wirecard's fake transactions, looked like a guy being caught by his own past. The rough count from that day is brutal — especially since Germany's biggest post-war financial scandal happened just 5 years ago:

27 × "No recollection"
12 × "Uh… wasn't involved"
9 × "Don't remember"
1 × Total silence when asked: "Did you even prepare for this?"

The witness's dodge tactics became a pattern fast. Judge: "Who controlled the TPA payments? Who was in charge?"  Thiede (bouncing his feet): "Different contact people… Marsalek, Bellenhaus, Ms. Schneider… uh… there wasn't much paperwork."  The judge throws contracts on the projector: "Here! Contracts signed wrong — different versions! Why?"  Thiede: "We had lots of question marks… uh… I wasn't really involved!"

Key moment: The judge projects a Wirecard internal "System Structure" diagram from November 21, 2019 on the courtroom screen. It showed Wirecard as the middleman between TPA merchants and payment processor — which the judge called "misleading,"  because TPA was supposedly just about holding the money in escrow accounts. Thiede's answer: "I don't recall the details."  When asked why EY showed it differently than KPMG, he shrugged: "I don't know."

The Phantom Merchants and Missing Mail

Here's the kicker: when they checked 34 merchants from Wirecard's Al Alam subsidiary, they found these guys were, according to Thiede, "basically doing no business."  Some companies were already shut down — in Tokyo, Moscow, Los Angeles. Thiede nodded: "Right!"  — but somehow forgot to mention that nobody ever really dug into what was actually behind these fake firms. A point that Dr. Braun's defense and former Chief Accountant Stephan von Erffa have been screaming about for years, filing motions and taking shots at the judges and prosecutors in Munich. State prosecutors and the judge have basically screamed this down. Meanwhile, the bank confirmations from Manila fell apart after Thiede was casually told about moving the escrow account from Singapore to the Philippines in December 2019 during a meeting with Jan Marsalek: "Yeah, I thought the trustee switch was weird."

At least "we at KPMG sent balance requests around the world through our own network,"  because the ones sent by regular registered mail were, he said, "intercepted."  Oliver Bellenhaus later asked: how did Thiede know they were intercepted? "Did it say so on the mail receipt?"

Thiede went on: "The bank in Manila [Editor's note: OCBC Bank, a big Asian bank rated very solid by Moody's] told us: nothing exists."  When Wirecard suddenly showed up with merchant lists in late April 2020, KPMG just ignored them — the report was already done, and it was obvious Wirecard was about to blow up. Did KPMG just sit around waiting for the move to Manila to finalize so that €2 billion in escrow money would simply disappear?

That Wirecard CEO Dr. Markus Braun eventually blew his top has been held against him for years. That he had some responsibility for growing the company is basically treated as a crime by the Munich courts. The charges against Braun: he allegedly threatened a KPMG employee with the "electric chair"  and pushed for "investor-friendly reporting"  of the audit findings. The court keeps bringing up how, in a March 11, 2020 memo, Braun claimed he knew everything about TPA, even though it was actually Marsalek, Bellenhaus, and others handling it. Braun also allegedly told KPMG manager Alexander Leitz: "I've got my finger on the trigger for your chair,"  then invited him to his ski house. Thiede confirms: "That didn't go over well!"  But he also admitted that on April 17, 2020, Wirecard gave KPMG a list of "comments on the draft report — places where the KPMG report didn't make sense, wasn't properly adjusted."

The Press Release, the Silence, and the Audit Mess

Things blew up on April 22, 2020: even though the audit wasn't done, Wirecard's supervisory board — not management — released a press statement claiming they had "real, genuine data"  proving the TPA transactions existed and KPMG had the proof. Thiede admitted KPMG never publicly pushed back — even though their contract said they could if the board was being misleading. His excuse: "It's not our job to contradict press releases."

By the end, the witness himself had basically convicted himself: "We couldn't trace the transactions. The key evidence — bank confirmations, complete transaction records — never showed up."  When the judge asked if Thiede had even prepared for his testimony, the courtroom went silent.

Thiede's memory problems became the symbol of an audit mess that surrounded the entire Wirecard scandal. Or did the audit mess actually enable the scandal in the first place?