In the Wirecard fraud trial, the former chief accountant of the financial group has admitted his own failings and reproached the public prosecutor's office.

"I can see for myself that I unfortunately also made mistakes that I regret," said the defendant Stephan von Erffa at the beginning of his testimony before the Munich Regional Court on Wednesday. He apologized for this. The 49-year-old had remained silent since the start of the trial more than a year and a half ago. "The reason was my feeling that I wasn't being listened to," said Erffa. "I had the impression that exculpatory evidence was not wanted."

For example, the public prosecutor stubbornly blamed him for damage to an iPad as an attempt to black him out, even though he had only dropped it. Erffa was temporarily remanded in custody on this charge. Erffa said that he would now make a detailed statement. The court has scheduled two days for his first presentation alone. His lawyers had described this as a contribution to clarification, but not as a confession.

The DAX company Wirecard collapsed in 2020 when it was discovered that 1.9 billion euros were missing from trust accounts in Asia. It is one of the biggest financial scandals in German post-war history. In the dock alongside Erffa are former Group CEO Markus Braun and the former Wirecard representative in Dubai, Oliver Bellenhaus. The public prosecutor's office describes the trio as a gang that invented transactions worth billions with so-called third-party partners. They speak of fraud, balance sheet falsification, market manipulation and breach of trust.

At the start of the trial in December 2022, Erffa merely confirmed his personal details and then left the stage to his co-defendants. They accuse each other. While Bellenhaus, as a confessed key witness, speaks of large-scale joint forgery, Braun rejects the accusations. The third-party business had existed, but Bellenhaus and the board member Jan Marsalek, who had gone into hiding, had embezzled the missing billions.

(Report by Jörn Poltz, edited by Ralf Banser. If you have any queries, please contact our editorial team at berlin.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for politics and the economy) or frankfurt.newsroom@thomsonreuters.com (for companies and markets).)