In mid-January 2025, the parlour-like courtroom in Munich’s Stadelheim Prison seemed to draw inspiration from the origins of table tennis. On 15 and 16 January 2025, a former Wirecard prosecutor was questioned there. The criminal proceedings against three former Wirecard executives have been running in the prison since December 2022. It was recently decided in the upper echelons of the Bavarian judiciary to continue the trial at least until 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 — agreed to question a former, younger public prosecutor named Heinen. Heinen had also previously worked under Bäumler-Hösl. The questioning concerned the highly important transcripts of co-defendant Oliver Bellenhaus’s interrogations from 15 July and 10 August 2020. Instead of playing table tennis with books, as the British officers did in the 1870s, the roughly 200-page transcripts of those interrogations were evidently used as the “ball”.The two days of questioning were devoted almost exclusively to the former Wirecard prosecutor. They were interrupted only by the video testimony of Jacob Powers, COO of the major payment provider CCBill, who appeared from Phoenix, Arizona. Heinen has recently been appointed as a judge at the very same Munich Regional Court where the presiding Wirecard judge, Födisch, sits. Hidden behind hours of very serious judicial questioning, conducted in a strictly hierarchical manner, was the rather mundane career information about the two Regional Court judges, both former Wirecard prosecutors. This background detail was probably intended to conceal what had been obvious from the outset: a bizarre ping-pong match of questioning between judicial colleagues.

The hearing transcripts from 15 July and 10 August 2020 are of enormous importance for the criminal proceedings. They serve as the blueprint for the entire indictment. Oliver Bellenhaus had been sent to prison only days earlier. He arrived at the Munich public prosecutor’s office in prison clothing after his first experiences in detention. Heinen began his testimony on 15 January 2025 by saying: "I remember well, it was very hot in the summer at that time. Mr Bellenhaus was also extremely heated up. We had offered him the chance 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 moment the audio recording began to function — a detail anyone can read in the minutes of 15 July 2020 — the court determined, in a skilful display of collegial ping-pong, that everything had been perfectly fine at the time. The technician had simply had problems with the equipment. Heinen stated that he had never heard of Wirecard’s chief prosecutor, Hildegard Bäumler-Hösl, meeting Oliver Bellenhaus’s lawyer for 20 minutes beforehand to discuss a crown-witness deal informally. This claim is somewhat surprising. One of the first recorded sentences in the transcript from 15 July 2020 shows Bäumler-Hösl stating: “Don’t worry, we have already done the Siemens procedure here in the department.” Even more striking is that Bellenhaus was apparently not properly read his rights in full at 9 a.m. He was “somehow made aware of this beforehand”. When asked in court, Bellenhaus nodded and confirmed that he had been “informed of his rights the night before”.

While the two judges continued their hour-long parlour-style ping-pong, they appeared to try to hypnotise the audience with seemingly endless back-and-forth exchanges. No one really dared to interrupt with questions. Perhaps months of the trial’s passive-aggressive conduct had left observers so psychologically worn down that it seemed safer to suppress any justified emotional reactions. The questioning itself already borders on a scandal. The presiding judge literally worked through the 200 pages paragraph by paragraph: first asking Heinen whether he remembered the relevant facts in general, then allowing the witness to explain them in detail. In almost every case, the judge then confirmed Heinen’s account in a collegial manner by reading out the corresponding transcript paragraph almost in full.

This continued for hours, covering 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, and Oliver Bellenhaus’s shocked reaction when he first learned about the annual salary of chief accountant von Erffa. One of the ping-pong highlights came when the discussion turned to Bellenhaus’s explanation, given back in July 2020, that only delayed batch payment transactions — rather than real-time ones — had been used for one of EY’s audits. Not only had EY apparently accepted this, but also the subsequent use of static screenshots as proof of payments. Yet the presiding judge concluded the relevant paragraph of the transcripts by stating: “EY was deceived.”.

The fact that the public prosecutor’s key witness, Oliver Bellenhaus, had declared about 10 % of all his private meals as business meals throughout his time at Wirecard was passed over just as elegantly as his claim that he had been severely disadvantaged by the usual 4 % annual salary increases granted to all other Wirecard employees. Perhaps this was because the credibility of the key witness had to be preserved at all costs. At the very end of the two-day hearing on the crucial mid-2020 transcripts, a money-laundering report from Germany’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), dated 15 July 2020 — the exact day Bellenhaus was made a crown witness — was projected in court. 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 split-second scroll of the screen revealed to attentive observers that the report had also been forwarded to the Munich public prosecutor’s office — the very office that was interviewing Bellenhaus at that precise moment on 15 July 2020. The report concerned Bellenhaus’s own Levantine Foundation in Liechtenstein, where money-laundering payments had been flagged. Heinen summarised the handling of the report in a nutshell: it “was kind of filed away”.

The legal ping-pong continued, moving from crown-witness claims about the “Aslam money destruction project” to an alleged lack of employees in Dubai and therefore supposedly fabricated sales revenues. Repeated attempts were made once again to portray the entire Wirecard company as a sham. The judge never tires of suggesting — no matter how implausibly — that more or less all of the company’s sales were fabricated, despite motions for evidence to the contrary. It became even clearer that Stadelheim is not particularly interested in shedding light on the core of the scandal when the court only briefly mentioned that “Manu Sahu was the chief programmer” — the man who had originally programmed Wirecard’s popular Elastic Engine software. Although chief accountant von Erffa had clearly stated in the months before the hearing that he had no friendly contact whatsoever with Oliver Bellenhaus — quite the opposite — the key witness had apparently told the Munich public prosecutor quite convincingly in July 2020: “von Erffa and I always agreed on the figures of the third-party partner business; the figures were falsified.” He further claimed that the chief accountant had told him at the beginning of 2020: “If you quit, I quit too.” Only a little later in the same July 2020 transcripts did it emerge that everyone had been invited to Oliver Bellenhaus’s wedding — except for his supposed super-colleague and friend, chief accountant Stephan von Erffa.

Apparently, a higher power sent a clear sign on the afternoon of the first of the two testimony days: more or less all the presiding judge’s screens went completely blank for several minutes for inexplicable reasons. However, apparently defying this apparent sign from above, the next hearing day continued with a series of attacks on Dr Markus Braun. Braun was accused of having had “countless conversations with Oliver Bellenhaus about the TPA figures” and of not shying away from the laborious back-and-forth journey through the emergency exit and around half 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 had also stated in another set of interrogation minutes from 10 August 2020 that “Wirecard had been plundered”. It was a bit like spectators at endless, breathtaking ping-pong matches who tend to ignore their own wallets for far too long.