Looking More Closely at the Wirecard Money Laundering Network
Some testimony from up in New York
What the Israelis are doing right now is dropping the story in Semafor about an Iranian influence operation, to distract from what I’m about to show you. Semafor was funded from Sam Bankman-Fried’s criminal fraud, and is edited by Israeli asset Ben Smith. Ray Akhavan, who is involved in all this, is also Iranian, but a lot of this network connects to the Israelis too.
All of this stuff calls into question the reasons for David Sacks’ views on Ukraine, and whether they truly do reflect a well-intentioned concern for American foreign policy. Take a look at the testimony of Oliver Hargreaves and Michael Tassone in the Eaze trial. Here are the raw files if you want to read the whole thing.
Here are some excerpts from Hargreaves:
This is probably the same Murphy who was killed in an accident in New Zealand in 2019.
This shows a connection between all this Wirecard stuff, and the OneCoin fraud. Armenta was married to Ruja Ignatova, the Bulgarian “cryptoqueen,” and went to prison for laundering the proceeds of that fraud.
PaySec is another fintech platform based in Valleta.
Hargreaves then works with Murphy to create payment processors for the explicit purpose of laundering illegal transactions.
He explicitly testifies to being in touch with Jan Marsalek, the Wirecard fugitive.
But someone seems to have discussed it with Marsalek.
Ray Akhavan connects Hargreaves to Christian Chmiel, who worked at Wirecard before moving to Webshield.
So this is Akhavan’s network being given access to what they needed to effectively fake company data and spoof banks.
It looks like what happened is after FBME shut down, all this stuff moved over to Wirecard.
Another interesting thing to note is they’re all using these Chinese and Russian apps. There’s some reporting in Wired that strongly suggests the Russians have compromised Telegram, and they’re also using Alibaba chat.
Eaze was using EU Processing and Clearsettle from 2016 to 2019.
The connection here between Akhavan and McCarty is very interesting.
From the summation:
The mention of Ozan Ozerk is interesting too, he is a Forbes councils member who is mentioned in the Paradise Papers doing a ton of business in Malta. He was added to the Clearsettle board in 2015.
Dan McCrum suggests Wirecard was even paying Akhavan’s legal bills:
So there are all these fraudulent cannabis transactions which appear to be moving between FBME and Wirecard, the exact details of which aren't exactly clear. Akhavan ran his money laundering network through FBME bank, which was cut off from the U.S. banking system in 2017, and investigated as part of the Mueller inquiry. Its Cyprus branch folded in June. And then a lot of that was picked up by Wirecard.
What this all shows is you have a Founders Fund-connected company run by David Sacks’ Yammerkuza people laundering payments through a network clearly run by Ray Akhavan. The fugitive Jan Marsalek, a likely Russian agent, according to the testimony here, is personally involved in the Eaze scheme.
All of this, FBME, Wirecard and Onecoin, have significant links to Russia as well, as well as China, Iran and Israel. And when you look at the PayPal Mafia’s closeness to certain neoconservative parts of the national security state, and the ways in which the top of the FBI was compromised, this whole thing has the whiff of high treason. This is one reason we need Buma to testify before Congress.