Thread by @michaeldweiss

NEW: Jan Marsalek, the fugitive COO of disgraced company Wirecard, wasn't just behind Germany's biggest financial fraud in history. @InsiderEng can now reveal he was also a GRU agent for a decade. theins.press/en/politics/26…

Marsalek been living in Russia for more than four years, using a passport that belongs to an Orthodox priest from Lipetsk, Father Konstantin Baiazov. We have the fake passport.

Marsalek has been busy in Russia. He activated his own agent network of Bulgarian spies in the UK. They've all been arrested. .theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/s…

And his use of former Austrian intelligence officers Martin Weiss and Egisto Ott to spy on Wirecard detractors has also made @InsiderEng one of his targets.

Her character kills her victims with a nerve agent (yes).

Zlobina and Marsalek became lovers around 2013, the time that Wirecard's attempted entry into the Russian market foundered.

They traveled a lot together. A trip to Grozny, to help Kadyrov's family launder money in Hong Kong. A flight aboard a MiG fighter jet. A trip to Kyiv in the midst of Euromaidan. Camping in Chernobyl. They also went into business together, investing in a crypto farm in Yakutia.

Then came Zlobina's birthday in July 2014. Aboard a yacht, she introduced him to "Stas, the general from GRU."

Stas is Stanislav Petlinsky, a former GRU Spetsnaz officer with combat experience in Chechnya. He and Marsalek "fell in love." Petlinsky confirms the yacht meet-cute in an exclusive interview with Spiegel. They found him at a five-star hotel in Dubai.

Life for Marsalek, according to friends, can be divided into two halves. "Before Stas" and "After Stas."

Petlinsky boasted that immediately after meeting Marsalek, he handed him over to the GRU. He also introduced him to lots of colorful people.

There's Anatoly Karaziy, a fellow GRU Spetsnaz operative, who happened to be the intelligence chief of a mercenary group called Wagner.

Andrey Chuprygin, another GRUnik, this one Putin's special representative to Libya, where Marsalek invested in cement factories, at Petlinsky's prompting.

Petlinsky took Marsalek on a trip to Palmyra, Syria. He fired a bazooka.

Petlinsky also tasked Marsalek with hiring a mercenary corps known as RSB Group to safeguard his Libyan investment. Marsalek bought it outright.

One of the co-owners of RSB was Petlinsky's son, Kirill Korobeynikov, who we've also determined led a hacking operation against Wirecard critics, including the FT's @FD. The email Korobeynikov used: [e-mail]

We also provide new details of how Marsalek fled Munich upon Wirecard's implosion in 2020. Petlinsky, his GRU handler, arranged his exfiltration.

And used an FSB-affiliated fixer in Russia to help Marsalek with his new identity as a priest. She is Evgeniya Kurochkin and she took Marsalek and Petlinsky to Russian-occupied Crimea after Marsalek's flight to Russia via Belarus.

We have telephone metadata proving they hung around Sevastopol and toured a series of hotels along the Crimean coast.

We also have the results of Marsalek's blood tests (he was worried about HIV and syphilis) from Moscow, where his blood was drawn multiple times from Petlinsky's swank apartment. His cover identity was that of another small-town Orthodox priest.

We tracked down the real priest, who told us he's never been tested for syphilis in his life.

Now here the story takes another bizarre and macabre turn.

Kurochkin, Marsalek's FSB travel agent, was in Berlin several times in the lead-up to the murder of former Chechen soldier and Georgian spy Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in a Berlin park in 2019.

The assassin, Vadim Krasikov, executed Khangoshvili with a special Glok pistol outfitted with a silencer. Kurochkin's number is stored in at least one Russian phone, described as "Glok converter."

German authorities are now investigating her possible involvement.

Putin wants Krasikov back more than any other Russian criminal asset. He described him as a "patriot" in that shambles of an interview with Tucker Carlson.

This investigation puts the Wirecard graft in a new light. Marsalek wasn't just a thief and a con artist -- he was working for Russian military intelligence at the height of Wirecard's fortunes, when it was on the DAX-30.

Wirecard was a colossal money-laundering front, with clients such as Germany's Federal Criminal Police, whose informants used the company's financial services.

Any information Wirecard was privy to was thus easily accessed by Moscow via Marsalek for whatever intelligence purposes Putin and the GRU wanted. /END