Episode 3: Thrill Seeking

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Before we begin, I just wanted to warn you, this episode contains descriptions of physical violence and war.

Previously on hot money.

At that point we just kind of had this sense that Marcelik was this kind of

man of action and was mixed up somehow in Viennese politics.

I know politics is corrupt, I know everything, I know that, I know that, I believe to know that, but this is too much.

I thought, I hope that he will talk to you and you will be able to investigate on it, and perhaps

misdeeds and misbehavior is stopped.

I'm in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia in North Africa.

I'm in a taxi on the way to meet Killian Kleinschmidt.

When I first met Killian at Café Procul in Vienna, he began to unravel what he knew about Jan Marselek.

It was a fantastical tale.

It seemed impossible to substantiate.

And as far as Killian was concerned at the time, it was absolutely not for publication.

But I believed it, and one of the reasons I did was because I found out more about who Killian is.

Not just a fantasist, someone who should be taken deadly seriously.

We kept in touch, and now he's ready to talk to me on tape.

I can't tell you exactly where he lives.

In fact, we've put our phones in Faraday bags to come here, electromagnetic shields that will stop the phones giving away our location.

Everything on this trip will be cash only.

But what I'll say is it's a big private house on the edge of a fashionable area of the city.

It's surrounded by a high white wall, like all the houses on this dusty street, and there are great clumps of magenta bougainvillea spilling over the top.

Hi.

Killian, I learned, has never led a conventional life.

I'm not even sure he knows what one is.

And perhaps that's why he ended up getting so involved in one of Jan Marcelek's wildest schemes.

Something so left-field that it helped me truly see Marcelec's ambitions.

Something about the lives of tens of thousands of the world's most desperate people, and how they might be controlled, used.

I've often found that people who operate outside the mainstream can be weirdly drawn together, sometimes meeting in the ambiguous space between what the world deems to be good and bad.

We tend to think that our values are at the core of us.

But people on the edge, well, they can sometimes show us how fragile that notion can be.

In this episode, we're going to hear Killian's story and how he found himself in Jan Marcelek's world, one very close, but very different to his own.

I have said this or sensed this that certain things in my life since then have gone terribly wrong, that I sometimes think this can't be a coincidence.

I'm Sam Jones.

From the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries, this is Hot Money Season 3: Agent of Chaos, episode 3: Thrill Seeking.

So, where do you want us, Killian?

As we call it, you can stay around the corner.

We're walking across a big open plan room that takes up almost the whole ground floor.

It's cool and airy, and Killian is directing us over to an arrangement of low sofas around a coffee table.

He's left the dogs outside, but indoors there's an assortment of cats who indifferently reveal themselves to us over the next few hours.

Killian grew up in Berlin in the 1970s and he felt drawn to alternative ways of life from a young age.

After some hard partying as a young punk teen, he left Germany aged just 18 to go and live in the mountains in southern France.

And so first there were the goats.

35 goats to be exact.

Making goat cheese, which is a pain in the neck because you have to get up at in the morning, five o'clock in the morning, milking these bloody goats.

So your first job was as a goat farmer?

Basically, yes.

Later, he founded a housing cooperative, learned how to be a roofer, and picked up a series of odd jobs along the way.

Worked as a stuntman.

Somehow I

any movies we might know?

How about the TV series Jean d'Arc?

Jeanne d'Arc as in Joan of Arc.

Yes.

Okay.

But Killian was still restless.

He left France and he decided to tour Africa on a motorbike.

And in doing that, he stumbled into humanitarian and peacekeeping work through a chance encounter over what else but drinks.

I always tell people when they ask me, how did you do your career?

I mean, how do you apply?

And so I said, I go into bars.

These are my favorite kind of stories.

In a bar in Mopti, a city in Mali, Killian met a young French couple.

They were building a school, and he, well, he had those roofing skills, so he helped them out.

And things just took off from there.

He got more construction jobs in the aid world.

His responsibilities grew.

Eventually, Killian became a trusted partner for the UN, working across Africa.

He'd found the unconventional life he was looking for, but he'd yet to experience real danger.

And then, one day, all that changed.

In 1991, Killian was 29 with a young family.

They were living happily in Uganda.

It was early in the morning, so he didn't hear them come in.

Four men, armed.

He woke up, his wife next to him, with a Kalashnikov pressed against his head.

Someone had told these four boys, really, that he had $30,000 hidden in the house.

It was a setup.

And then they did everything with me, what you can do to someone you try to get $30,000 from.

As in, they beat you up or...

Beating me up, putting me against the wall, then saying, now we shoot in your legs, now we rape your wife, now we

just killed

your gardener, we just, oh, by the way, we killed your cook, now we're going to kill your baby, then you hear our baby crying.

I mean, in that moment, did you think you were going to die?

Yes.

Because the four guys looking for something they don't get, getting increasingly agitated and angry.

That's it.

They turned the house upside down.

The money, of course, wasn't there, but for whatever reason, they didn't kill Killian.

In fact, thankfully, they didn't kill anyone.

They just left Killian badly beaten up.

The horror of that experience would have broken most people, and maybe it did Killian, but not how you would expect.

I guess most other people, or many other people, would think, okay, that's it.

I'm moving back to the Pyrenees

my wife and my young child.

I'm guessing that you didn't do that.

Yeah, that's kind of correct.

My wife said, I had it, I need a break.

Somehow then she left for Canada for many months.

And I went and said, now I need to go into it.

I need to deep dive into violence.

And he did.

In the coming years, Killian would put himself, using his connections in the UN, into the most dangerous places he could.

When the fighting died down in one place, he moved somewhere else, often somewhere with an even more challenging humanitarian situation.

South Sudan, Somalia, Zaire, Sri Lanka.

He describes days hiding in swamps while being hunted by militias.

I was surrounded by war.

I was surrounded by guns.

Everything I was in fact afraid of was there plentiful.

I mean I sort of transformed from the soft goat keeping hippie guy into a tough sort of

manager in the middle of the war.

I mean transformation goes pretty fast I must say.

He told me about one time his compound in Mogadishu was attacked.

When we get out of the the bunker

security says it's all over.

But there's one guy lying in the street in an army uniform and too late they realize he's a suicide bomber.

And he pulls the trigger, and then vroom, and then sort of all the body parts fly over the wall and touch the grain between us.

So today,

when there's

a dead mouse somewhere, that's when everything comes back.

That's when the images come back of dead bodies on the road.

In another story he tells me, it's the height of the battle for control of Mogadishu, when he and a few others climb up onto the roof of the hotel where they're staying at dusk.

A heavy orange sun is in the sky.

So we were sitting there with a few people having a beer or whiskey or so which we still managed to get and watching the fighting.

I mean it was crazily wild, pervertly romantic at the same time.

Like watching Apocalypse Now or something, seeing the black hawks and other choppers flying into the sunset and then you're again fighting somewhere and shooting, and you're sitting on your roof and you're having your whiskey.

The horror, it's also bound up with the thrill, with the sense that this, and not the comforts of a peaceful home life, is what's real.

And I do get it.

Even listening to Killian recount this stuff is intoxicating.

There's a powerful, hugely seductive kind of beauty to it.

It's disturbing in some ways, but also cinematic.

And who hasn't thought about their lives as a film?

Can I just ask, how were you feeling during this?

Were you afraid?

I mean, given that you've described earlier that in a way you wanted to plunge into violence, to cure yourself of your fear of it, maybe, or to somehow kind of move beyond it.

I mean, that's also what humanitarian organizations are exploiting in a way, because they're getting people into this sort of this Adelnaleen

hyper thing,

and they begin to feel invincible.

You're becoming the coolest of the coolest in all of this.

I mean you're completely hyped up.

I mean I started to feel already very good at this.

That was just basically after two and a half years of being in war zones and it felt I was a champion.

It sounds like a bit of an addiction.

Of course it's an addiction and that's but it's being also used by the organization.

The organization, meaning the UN, his employer at the time.

This is how Killian sees it.

So they're identifying the people who are becoming junkies

and they set them a shot from time to time so they stay junkies.

You don't get the chance to cool down and get back to your family.

I mean, I had a family at the time sitting in Nairobi.

But recuperation becomes stressful because nobody understands you.

I mean, your colleagues become your friends and your family.

They understand what it means.

When you say, well, we had an IED, we had an improvised explosive device, or we had a VBIID, they understand what it means.

Yes, there has been a car bomb.

Nobody else understands.

Nobody understands the feeling of what it means.

Killian climbs the UN ladder.

But over time, he finds his maverick methods rub up against an increasingly bureaucratic organization.

And the way humanitarian work is funded is changing too.

NGO and government budgets are going down.

The private sector, institutions and individual wealthy donors are becoming more important than ever.

Over time, Killian begins to feel that perhaps he should at least try a more normal way of life.

So after three decades, finally in 2014, Killian decides to leave the UN.

He settles in Vienna, as far as he can settle, and launches an aid consultancy.

A burgeoning migrant crisis on Europe's borders, and in the Balkans in particular, means he's in high demand.

But he doesn't exactly thrill to the work.

European governments are mostly looking to find short-term domestic solutions for the problem.

They don't want to do the hard stuff, tackling it at its source, in Africa and the Middle East.

The consultancy work is all about fundraising, meetings with stakeholders, trial la over canopes and PowerPoints.

It's not a very Killian kind of world.

Enter Jan Maselek.

It was around this time that an Austrian lobbyist, government-connected, got in touch.

He tells Killian, I want you to meet someone.

I have a client called Jan Marselek.

He's the COO of Wirecard, but this is in his private capacity.

He wants to contribute to the stabilization of Libya.

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In 2018, Killian gets an invitation to come and meet his new prospective backer, Marcelek.

Marcelek suggests they meet at the Kieferschenke, the very place he met my editor, Paul Murphy, and handed him the chemical formula for Novichok.

Kieferschenke in English means the Ladybird Tavern.

Ladybug, if you're American.

There are little ladybird emblems and pictures dotted around, but it's not kitschy.

This is still a white tablecloth place.

All Killian knows is that he's meeting a wealthy Austrian businessman.

He's never heard of Jan Marcelek, but that's not an issue.

At least, nothing a little keyboard due diligence can't smooth.

Started googling a bit and, okay,

big, huge DAX company.

The DAX is Germany's main stock market index, the 40 largest public German companies, a bit like the S ⁇ P 500 or the FTSE 100.

It signals to Killian that Wirecard and Marseillek should be taken seriously.

I had been sort of a lot looking into how

the

industry, how business can actually

do what the humanitarians can't do.

So I thought it was a great idea that if somebody has personal interests or business interests actually contributes,

and it's not the humanitarians who are going to stabilize places, it's business, it's this type of

other resources which the humanitarian world will never produce.

Killian has been told that Marcelec is interested in funding humanitarian projects in Libya.

Libya was a mess.

Since the Qaddafi regime was deposed in 2011 at the height of the Arab Spring, it had been mired in civil war.

Nothing about its future seemed at that point certain, and it was also, thanks to its newfound lawlessness, a highway for African refugees looking to get into Europe, the longest, then unpatrolled coastline of any African country on the Mediterranean.

A reporter with the FT, Borzou Daragahi, was on the ground to see what conditions in one of the country's notorious migrant detention centers were like.

Hot, dirty, overcrowded cells like this one are a way of life at the Tarabouli Migrant Detention Center just east of Libya's capital, Tripoli.

Rooms meant for perhaps 20 people are commonly filled with 100.

These men, women, and children have come from as far as Eritrea and Ethiopia.

They risk their lives along desert smuggling routes lined with bandits and other dangers.

But Libya was also a place rich in opportunities for those with an appetite for danger.

A huge oil-exporting nation, a major military power in Africa, a playground for spies.

The prospect of some work there tantalized Killian.

Marcelec arrives for lunch.

He's all polish.

You get a little bit jealous.

Well, this guy is much younger than me and he is good looking and he is well dressed.

Everything he has smells money and care and everything is perfect and I come with my cheap

trousers and whatnot.

A little envy prompts some German-Austrian rivalry.

Well, it's a typical Austrian sort of

showing off person.

I've seen many of those in Vienna.

Over lunch, the conversation becomes competitive.

What I call always the male cockfight in the beginning.

They try to impress the other one

of how cool you are and how tough you are and where you have been and so on.

This is you and Marcellek.

Yeah, Marcelec, you know how two cocks are when they're showing the nice feathers and so on.

Killian tells Marcelek stories.

He recounts the dangerous, violent and volatile situations he has lived in around the world.

But Marcelek is not to be outdone.

And then

very fast actually he started then talking about his experience in Syria, facilitated by the boys just after the recapture of the city of Panyra from ISIS.

When he said with the boys, what did you say?

He basically said with the Russians.

Marcelec tells Killian that he arrived in Syria in a MiG-8.

He describes how the helicopter banked and turned, and with a blast of dry, hot air through the open door, he looked down on the vast ruins of Roman Palmyra below.

He was the guest of the head of intelligence for the Wagner Group.

Russia's most notorious mercenary army.

They didn't linger, Marcelec said.

It was too dangerous.

But there was time for some photos.

I've seen those photos.

There's a hastily snapped selfie in front of the amphitheatre, and another shot in front of a burned-out tank, and one of him aiming a bazooka.

In all of them, Marcelec is posing, basically, in body armour and sometimes wearing dark blue aviators.

To me, he seems almost boyishly excited.

What's remarkable is that Marcelek's story, all this boasting about being in Syria, didn't strike Killian as unusual at the time.

But Killian is not a very usual kind of person.

It didn't click in my head that it's a bit strange that a payment provider would be going into such an area.

If it had clicked, maybe he could have avoided what happened next.

I can only assume Killian wasn't taken aback because of the way Marcelek framed the story.

He told Killian that when he saw war-ravaged Syria for himself, he realized he wanted to stop that kind of thing from happening elsewhere, like in Libya.

Marcelec convinced Killian that he wanted to make a difference, to make the world a better place.

As Killian understood it, Marcelec wanted to commission a development plan.

a blueprint for how to end lawlessness on Libya's southern border, where there was no government control.

He spoke about the gold mines at the border to Chad, where people have to work for two years to get their passage to Europe paid off.

He spoke about the guys sitting in Monaco and being the people behind the whole business, that they were earning $100 per person crossing into Europe.

He displayed sort of a more emotional

something has to be done to stop all of that.

And And maybe

I felt that he was genuine in that somehow.

He sounds quite impressive.

It didn't click as sort of a political ploy at that moment.

It felt more, yes, I want to do something.

I want to contribute, so I will put 200,000 euros into you, Killian, and your team, so that there should be...

collateral financing to have a full plan of what to do with Libya so that this doesn't happen.

Killian came away from his first lunch with Jan Marcelek, feeling good about his new project and his new client.

He built a team and he got to work doing research and making plans to pull together a kind of feasibility study on how to bring law and order to the region and improve the lives of the people living there, who to speak to and what to say to them.

But it wasn't long before there were signs that not all was as it seemed.

Killian had been told that he could trust Marcelec's handshake, and that Marcelec wouldn't sign a contract anyway.

So there wasn't much Killian could do about what happened next.

But then no money.

There was no payment coming.

I mean, w did it not strike you as odd that there's this there's this wealthy backer who has money and he's just not not paying?

Yes, of course I said, what is this?

I mean, you told me it's unshaked quality.

Fine, we engage without without a contract, should have never done this.

Big mistake.

At this point Killian is still dealing with Marcelek through an intermediary, Marcelec's lobbyist in Vienna.

And after a lot of pestering about the missing finance, the intermediary gives him a very strange answer.

He says, send your invoice to the Libyan Russian Institute in Moscow.

Which is odd because no such institute even seems to exist there.

There's more.

When Killian suggests that they should organize a trip to Libya, so he can talk to his backer about his plans and show him how they might work on the ground, he gets told this will also be arranged, but from Moscow.

That trip will be organized by

Colonel Chubrigin.

Andrei Chubrigin in Moscow.

So who's Colonel Andrei Chubrigin?

Oh, he the

coordinator of Russian interests in Northern Africa and the Middle East.

By now, I'm thinking for almost anyone, the jig would be up.

Whatever this project was, it was not simply some idea from an Austrian businessman with a good heart and an open checkbook.

Killian, though, still didn't pull the plug.

Maybe because at this point, he's already paid his team a considerable amount of money from his own pocket, and he's really quite proud of the work they've done, the study they've begun to produce.

So he needs to sort things out one way or the other, and the only way to do that is to demand another face-to-face meeting with Marcelek.

And that's how, in February 2018, Killian finds himself standing on a street corner in a wealthy district of Munich.

On the opposite side of the street is the Russian consulate.

He's waiting directly outside a grand four-story Grundetzeit 19th century villa.

One of these big mansions we'll find in Vienna, you will find in Munich, you will find in all the central European cities where very wealthy business families built this at some point.

It's so big, he struggles to figure out how to get in.

There doesn't seem to be a doorbell.

When somehow the doors of the villa they open

mysteriously.

This is Jan Marcelek's house and personal office.

Marcelec meets Killian, who is with a colleague, on the first floor.

There's some impressive contemporary art on the walls, but not a lot else.

Normal people, when they live in a place, there is always some crap lying around.

I mean, it's a place where we kind of live.

And when I come in a place like that, then it feels like it's like a showroom.

It's nothing personal.

They enter a capacious meeting room.

There's a spread of coffee, juices, and biscuits.

They make small talk, and then they get down to business.

But it doesn't go well.

Maselik was visibly bored.

He sort of treated us as little boys who come up with ridiculous humanitarian crap.

Basically, he said this is all child's stuff.

This is children's stuff.

This is too small.

I was thinking big projects, big industries.

I mean, he basically dismissed what we had done.

But Marcelek is excited about something else.

He's got a video he wants to show Killian.

I have, in German, they say Geil, I mean, exciting video material.

Geil in this context, I think you'd probably best translate as sexy, cool.

Marcelec seems pretty psyched up about it.

It's a video filmed using some new military equipment.

Body cams worn by soldiers.

Body cams worn by Wagner, the Russian mercenary army.

Marcelec is interested in getting some of these cameras for his own purposes.

He boasts to Killian that the content of the video is shocking.

used in public.

Because the video is graphic footage of

people being murdered.

Yes.

But it's great footage and so on.

It's a pity basically we can't show it.

But let's talk about all this after the meeting.

What were you thinking when he was saying that?

I said, oh shit.

I mean,

there's something going on here.

Killian finally begins to understand that this humanitarian project is not at all what it seems.

Trying to move things on from the video, Killian asks how this relates to their work.

The answer chills Killian.

He says Marcelek told him, What I want really is to convert militia men into border guards.

Fifteen, twenty thousand, something big, and we train and equip them and so on.

He wants to create a military force in Libya, a border guard that would stop migrants crossing crossing into or out of Libya.

He wants to equip it and fund it and control it.

That was sort of a key moment where I said

there's something very wrong.

Afterwards, Killian replayed that meeting over and over in his head.

He asked himself, who is Jan Marcelek really?

He couldn't come up with a clear answer, and perhaps, since his invoices were still open, he didn't want to.

But there was something about the whole situation which made him think that Marcelek might not just be a wealthy fantasist,

that he might be serious about these proposals, and he might even have the means to achieve them.

He tried to ignore that feeling until he couldn't.

It really sort of

clicked completely later that year, I think, in October, November.

That's when Killian bumped into a military contact who had also been working on the side with Marcelek.

He tells him, Killian, you know, with Jan one cannot work.

He's too close to the Russians.

So from that point onwards, and that's late 2018,

here I am with

something where I know there is

a lot more to the whole story.

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T-Mobile knows all about that.

They're now the best network, according to the experts at OoCla Speed Test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged.

With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

That's your business, supercharged.

Learn more at supermobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.

where you can see the sky.

Best network based on analysis by OOCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

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Killian Kleinschmidt knows he has potentially explosive information about Jan Marcelek.

But Killian also also knows he has to be careful.

He knows Austria well enough now, enough to know that Marcelek, while somewhat in the shadows, seems to be extremely well connected.

Months go by, and then, in the summer of 2019, Killian sees an opportunity to raise the alarm.

He's in Tunis, and he's invited to a garden party at the residence of the Austrian ambassador to Libya, who's based there.

He grabs a few minutes with the host.

And I explained to him the story that an Austrian national very much doing strange things in

Libya and whether it was on their radar screen and so on.

And when I had finished the story then he said,

you have to be careful, it could be one of them.

You have to be careful.

I could be one of them.

Even though this sounds ominous, when I first heard this, I took it as a joke.

And the ambassador confirmed as much to me.

He told me he remembers meeting Killian, but doesn't recall exactly what he said, and that making joking remarks sounds like something he'd probably do, just to try and break the ice.

He wanted to make clear, though, that he didn't, and doesn't, have a connection to Marcelek.

Regardless, back then, at this party, Killian is already feeling nervous and gets the impression he should hold his tongue.

An impression reinforced when, a year later, at the same garden party, the ambassador joked again.

That's when he's sat in front of other people and saying,

oh, that's Kleinschmidt.

Yeah, I have the instruction to not let you out alive.

So

obviously humor, but it was

menacing as well.

Kind of menacing, kind of immature.

I mean, even though it was a joke, there is a slight message there for you, isn't there?

He's trying to tell you something, which is maybe that you're annoying, or maybe you should shut up.

Basically, yes.

So from then on, Killian only speaks to one or two close friends about Marcelek.

He worries that if he tells anyone who knows him less well, he might land himself in serious trouble or end up sounding like, well, a bit cracked, another unpaid contractor with an axe to grind and a conspiracy to peddle.

But other events at the time, they keep making him question again and again, just what was Marcelec up to?

A few months after after Killian broke off his connection with Marcelec, he moved to northern Greece.

The borders were closed.

Huge numbers of migrants were trying to come into Europe from the Levant due to the war raging in Syria.

Even though Killian's officially retired from the UN, he'd remained plugged in.

Thanks to Killian's years of frontline work, his network of sources bring him disturbing nuggets of information about the situation.

They tell him, even though the borders are closed, it seems that over and over again, desperate groups of migrants believe otherwise.

They're being fed lies.

Through my network, we found out that somehow there were rumors spread that Merkel would open the borders again.

Angela Merkel, Germany's chancellor at the time.

She had already accepted hundreds of thousands of migrants into Germany.

We found very strong indications, even photos of people who were in different locations telling that story.

And this story, I mean, went from northern Iraq, and it was in Turkey, and it was in the entire region, this sort of go

Europe.

Telling that story to refugees in camps.

In camps, out of camps, already on the move, already in Greece,

and so on.

So people started moving in this direction.

Hospitals are being bombed in Syria at the time by the Russians, who are fighting alongside their client, Bashar Assad, the country's ruler.

They seem to be deliberately worsening the humanitarian crisis.

And something for Killian falls into place.

What if the Russians are spreading these lies about open borders in Europe, too?

He makes the leap back to Marcelek.

What if Marcelec wanted to do something similar in southern Libya, to use a force controlling the border, to influence migrant flows?

At first it all all feels too outlandish to him, but with time, he starts to believe it.

For the most part, though, he keeps all these suspicions to himself, out of fear, until the day he spoke to me.

When Killian told it to me, it rang bells.

I thought straight away of the late US Senator John McCain.

He'd said the very same thing in 2016 at the Munich Security Conference with reference to Syria.

He wants to shore up the Assad regime.

He wants to re-establish Russia as a major power in the Middle East.

He wants to use Syria as a live fire exercise for Russia's modernizing military.

And he wants to exacerbate the refugee crisis and use it as a weapon to divide the transatlantic alliance and undermine the European project.

Russia's interest in weaponizing migration was being taken seriously as a threat to NATO by the world's biggest military power, the USA.

So this idea of Killian's, that Marcellet could be working for Russia in Libya to control migration for political influence, it's actually not as far-fetched as it seems.

Then, six months after I first met Killian, in June 2020, something happened.

Extraordinary story.

Admission, of course, from payments firm Wirecard this week that the missing $2 billion may never have existed at all.

After months of tireless reporting by my colleague at the FT, Dan McCrum, Wirecard, the fintech giant Marcelek had helped build as chief operating officer, the corporate edifice around which he had constructed his entire public persona, collapsed.

Meanwhile, Wirecard's auditors are in hot hot water too.

EY says a $2.1 billion hole in the firm's accounts is the result of sophisticated fraud.

Now Marcus Brown, of course, has resigned or has resigned on Friday as the CEO of that company, the chief operating officer, was also sacked over the weekend.

Once Wirecard exploded, some of the other people involved in Marcelec's Libya scheme, they became more talkative.

And within, well, just four weeks or so, Killian's crazy tale went from being an unprintable conspiracy to an established set of facts we could attribute to multiple sources.

But I wanted to be certain we weren't over-interpreting Marcelek's links to Russian intelligence.

So I went with what we knew to one of my most important contacts.

I can't really tell you about them.

That's a condition of me being in touch with them.

But they work for a European government.

Let's leave it there.

They confirmed what I thought.

Marcelec really did have ties to Russian spies, specifically, it seemed, to the GRU, Russia's fearsome military intelligence agency, the organization responsible for the Salisbury poisonings.

Killian decided he wanted to go public.

He outed himself and gave testimony to a special committee of the German parliament investigating Warkard.

Killian doesn't regret doing that, but he's also, over time, become more and more convinced that he was right to be afraid.

His life has never quite been the same.

Twice now, he's been on the edge of financial ruin, thanks to projects he's gotten involved in, which have exploded in his face.

And he doesn't think it's a coincidence.

It may not be sort of the extreme sort of movie-style revenge, but it may be a sort of destroy

option of

guiding me and leading me into traps,

which is very intelligent if you want to make somebody suffer.

I was promised things which never happened,

so almost by design, and it led to one of the most horrible years in my life, in being completely destitute, in fact.

Even now, he struggles.

He keeps being approached by odd characters, people connected to Russia, who seem to be trying to lure him into misadventures.

For all his experience, his bravery, and his force of personality, Killian still ended up vulnerable.

What Killian revealed about Marcelek was, it still is, wild.

But it wasn't the end of the story at all.

It was really just the beginning.

It was a revelation that triggered as many questions as it answered.

Was Marcelek working exclusively for the Russians?

Was he a kind of freelancer?

Did the wirecard fraud involve Russia too?

What did Russia want from Marcelek?

The obvious person to ask, of course, was Marcelec himself.

Except, we couldn't.

On June 17th, 2020, with Warcard's management, employees and shareholders still reeling from the fact that billions were missing, Jan Marcelek told colleagues he was urgently flying to Manila.

where the money was supposed to have disappeared.

He said he was going to sort out the mystery and prove Warkard had nothing to hide.

Except, in reality, he was in a car heading across the Alps.

It was a beautiful day, hot, a clear blue sky, perfect weather to fly.

Bad Vurslau Airport is a small regional airstrip in Austria used mostly by amateur aviators.

A car pulled up on the tarmac that day and outstepped Jan Marcelek.

The border checks were a formality.

No one was really watching down there.

Marcelec had a suitcase with him.

It was full of cash.

Here's your fare, he must have told the pilot.

Next stop, Minsk, Belarus.

Coming up on hot money, the people who were left behind, trying to make sense of it all.

And we walked around and

unbelievable.

You walk around and you see a parallel world and all the explanation, yeah, this room is soundproof, this room

got searched every other week by a specialist for microphones and surveillance stuff.

We were flabbergasted.

We were

speechless.

It had never happened like that.

I mean, we were all important people in the company.

It was like a punch in the face.

Top 10 white collar crime of the century.

Hot Money is a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries.

It was written and reported by me, Sam Jones.

The senior producer and co-writer is Peggy Sutton.

Our producer is Izzy Carter.

Our researcher is Maureen Saint.

Our show is edited by Karen Shikurchi.

Fact-checking by Kira Levine.

Sound design and mastering by Jake Gorski and Marcelo de Oliveiera.

With additional sound design by Izzy Carter.

Original music from Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Sinfonet.

Our show art is by Sean Carney.

Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley, Amy Gaines-McQuaid and Matthew Garahan.

Additional editing by Paul Murphy.

Special thanks to Rula Claffe, Dan McCrum, Laura Clark, Alistair Mackey, Manuele Saragossa, Nigel Hansen, Vicki Merrick, Eric Sandler, Morgan Ratner, Jake Flanagan, Jacob Goldstein, Sarah Nix, and Greta Cohn.

I'm Sam Jones.

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