Braun, 53, and two different managers are on trial on costs together with market manipulation and fraud and could possibly be sentenced for as much as 15 years in jail if convicted.
Braun has at all times denied wrongdoing.
Wirecard’s collapse two years in the past despatched shockwaves by the German political institution and tarnished the nation’s business repute.
At the beginning of the trial final week, prosecutors accused Braun and others of being a part of a gang that invented huge sums of phantom income by bogus transactions with companion corporations to mislead collectors and buyers.
They mentioned the deception allowed Wirecard’s managers to siphon cash out of the corporate for years.
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Braun’s lawyer Alfred Dierlamm’s defence sought to puncture these claims in courtroom on Monday. He instructed the courtroom that Braun had by no means offered his Wirecard shares and had truly taken the initiative to name in outdoors auditors from KPMG to analyze Wirecard’s funds.
“It’s an absolutely absurd and erroneous notion that a gang leader would act like this,” Dierlamm instructed the courtroom.
He mentioned Braun’s case had been prejudiced since Wirecard’s collapse and his consumer’s arrest in 2020, alleging that the prosecutors had been biased and below strain to discover a offender after one other of Wirecard’s managers, Jan Marsalek, fled overseas.
Braun’s lawyer instructed the courtroom that the prosecution’s key witness was the principle perpetrator.
Dierlamm requested for the trial to be suspended to offer the defence extra time overview paperwork, given the amount of “files that were dumped on our table”.
Founded in 1999 and primarily based within the Munich suburb of Aschheim, Wirecard’s spectacular rise reworked it from a fee processor for pornography and on-line playing to a showpiece for a brand new kind of German tech firm that might compete with the established titans of Europe’s largest financial system.
Its demise shook the German institution, placing below scrutiny politicians who backed the corporate and regulators who took years to analyze it.
After batting away suspicions of wrongdoing from buyers and journalists and efficiently lobbying the German authorities to analyze those that had been scrutinising its funds, Wirecard was pressured to confess in June 2020 that 1.9 billion euros ($2 billion) had been lacking from its stability sheet.
Wirecard turned the first-ever member of Germany’s DAX blue chip inventory index to file for insolvency, owing practically $4 billion.
In courtroom, Dierlamm questioned the credibility of statements by Braun’s co-defendant Oliver Bellenhaus, the previous head of Wirecard’s subsidiary in Dubai, who turned a witness after turning himself in to German authorities in 2020.
Bellenhaus’s lawyer final week requested for a diminished sentence for his consumer in recognition of his co-operation.
“Bellenhaus is not a key witness,” mentioned Dierlamm. “Bellenhaus is the main perpetrator of a gang” whose sole purpose was to divert and embezzle funds from the corporate.
Another former government, Stephan von Erffa, can be on trial. He has publicly expressed remorse concerning the occasions at Wirecard however denied orchestrating them. His lawyer has mentioned von Erffa didn’t need to touch upon the fees.
Marsalek, Wirecard’s former chief working officer, is a world fugitive on Europe’s most wished listing whose whereabouts are unknown.
A verdict will not be anticipated earlier than 2024 on the earliest.
(Writing by Matthias Williams. Editing by Jane Merriman)