A Russian spymaster behind a UK-based espionage ring may have worked with MI6 and US intelligence before he fled to Moscow, it has been reported.
Fugitive businessman Jan Marsalek could have been the ‘greatest asset’ for western intelligence agencies until he was implicated in Germany’s biggest ever fraud, security sources have suggested.
Marsalek, 44, directed a group of six UK-based Bulgarians in espionage activities across Europe, including kidnap and rendition plots.
He exchanged almost 80,000 messages with the spy cell’s UK boss, Orlin Roussev, plotting six sinister operations including surveillance of Ukrainian soldiers at a US airbase in Germany.
The spies were last week convicted at the Old Bailey and face up to 14 years in prison.
But Marsalek, the former chief operating officer of electronic payments firm Wirecard, remains at large having fled Munich when the company collapsed amid a £1.6billion fraud.
The grandson of a Soviet spy, Marsalek is thought to have been brought into Russian intelligence by former GRU officer Stanislav Petlinsky after the pair met on a yacht at his girlfriend’s birthday party in Nice, France, in 2014.
In 2018, he was found to have been in possession of top secret documents which contained the formula for Novichok, the deadly nerve agent used to poison Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury that same year.
Jan Marsalek, 44, directed a group of six UK-based Bulgarians in espionage activities across Europe, including kidnap and rendition plots
He exchanged almost 80,000 messages with the spy cell’s UK boss, Orlin Roussev (pictured), plotting six sinister operations
Marsalek is also accused of plotting to use private armies to control the flow of migrants into Europe at Vladimir Putin’s behest
German minister Bernd Schmidbauer, who had previously run its intelligence services, later told an inquiry this discovery was discussed by agencies around the world and met with Marsalek that year to discuss how he obtained the formula.
During that meeting, Marsalek boasted to him that he had security services around the world ‘in my pocket’ and had been ‘talking to them for years.’
Mr Schmidbauer said he believed that multiple intelligence agencies had been eager to speak with the businessman at this point so Wirecard could be used ‘to closely monitor certain money laundering operations, organized crime.’
Wirecard pre-paid cards were used by undercover operatives at Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), and its Federal Intelligence Service (BND) as early as 2013.
The US Department of Justice contacted Marsalek in 2019 to ask for his help tracing a fugitive, a source told The Sunday Telegraph.
And Petlinsky told the newspaper his protégé had ‘a very good connection with a representative of MI6 in London’.
However, intelligence sources told the Mail that it was ‘a stretch’ to suggest that because Wirecard may have been used by other western law enforcement agencies that Marsalek was a UK intelligence asset.
Marsalek is also accused of plotting to use private armies to control the flow of migrants into Europe at Vladimir Putin’s behest.
In 2017, he tried to mobilise a 15,000-strong band of mercenaries to control the border in Libya, a key migration route, Der Spiegel reported.
