Archive link From the article: I don't know if anyone else here is quite as fascinated and horrified as I am about the continuing exposure of the institutional rot that Russia has fostered...
Fugitive Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek used compromised intelligence officials in Vienna to spy on European citizens and plot break-ins and assassinations by elite Russian hit squads. He also obtained a Nato government’s cutting-edge cryptography machine and smuggled stolen senior Austrian civil servants’ phones to Moscow.
The allegations — based on new evidence obtained by British intelligence — are contained in an Austrian police warrant for the arrest of a former Austrian police and intelligence official, Egisto Ott.
Ott was taken into custody last Friday.
A copy of the warrant was seen by the Financial Times. Its contents were first reported by Austria’s Der Standard newspaper.
They are the most extensive official allegations to date that Marsalek, 44, was not only compromised by Russia, but may have been one of the Kremlin’s most powerful European intelligence assets, using his position as chief operating officer at the top of a Dax-listed company that almost took over Deutsche Bank, to facilitate violent clandestine operations across the continent and in Africa.
The 86-page warrant claims Marsalek commissioned Ott, and another senior security official, Martin Weiss, the head of Austrian intelligence operations, to facilitate undercover work for Russia’s military intelligence (GRU) and domestic intelligence (FSB) on European soil over a period of at least five years from 2017. Weiss has since fled Austria and now lives in Dubai. He could not be immediately reached for comment.
The revelations add to the concerns that Wirecard itself, a payment processing company that was once the darling of Europe’s fintech scene before being exposed as a fraud by the FT, may for years have been used as a shadow financial network to pay and facilitate Russian undercover operations beyond the detection of Nato security services.
I don't know if anyone else here is quite as fascinated and horrified as I am about the continuing exposure of the institutional rot that Russia has fostered globally.
However much European and Anglophone nations might have wished to believe otherwise, the Cold War never went away. The Chekists never lost their grip on the Russian national security state, and now comprise the formal, totalitarian government of Russia.
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From the article:
I don't know if anyone else here is quite as fascinated and horrified as I am about the continuing exposure of the institutional rot that Russia has fostered globally.
However much European and Anglophone nations might have wished to believe otherwise, the Cold War never went away. The Chekists never lost their grip on the Russian national security state, and now comprise the formal, totalitarian government of Russia.