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Yoshio Tomiie was not legally required to fly from Kuala Lumpur to Frankfurt to testify at the Wirecard trial, but this week he chose to do so.
More than a year since the start of a trial tasked with unpicking one of Germany’s biggest postwar corporate frauds, the 64-year-old Japanese citizen was the first witness who had been a director of one of the Asian companies allegedly at the heart of Wirecard’s deception.
Tomiie, an entrepreneur who has spent much of his career selling cosmetics in his native Japan, was a director of Singapore-based Senjo, one of the Asian businesses that Wirecard said it outsourced payments processing to. The German company claimed that the businesses, or third-party acquiring (TPA) operations, accounted for half its sales and all its profits.
Lauded for more than a decade as a rare German tech success, Wirecard collapsed into insolvency in 2020 after disclosing that €1.9bn in cash linked to its Asian operations did not exist.
Munich prosecutors claimed the operations were a sham, making Tomiie’s surprise appearance this week a rare chance for the five judges at the trial, where Wirecard’s former head Markus Braun and two other top executives face multiple charges, to glean insights into the opaque operations.
Taking the stand on Wednesday at the start of two days of testimony, Tomiie said that he was not aware that Senjo had ever processed payment transactions for Wirecard.
Sporting a dark suit, white shirt and tie, Tomiie stressed that he had not been involved in Senjo’s day-to-day operations. He thought he had simply been hired as Senjo’s “nominee director” because Singapore requires overseas companies to have a director who is a local resident.
“I dealt with registering the company [Senjo] but was not involved in the operative business,” he said, explaining that he often signed documents and contracts for the group without reading them in detail.
“It is embarrassing for me to expose myself here as someone who [just rubber-stamped contracts],” adding that he did so because Wirecard’s status as a large listed German company inspired trust and Jan Marsalek, its former chief operating officer, was charismatic.
“People tell me that this was rather stupid,” said Tomiie, who was paid a monthly salary of S$15,000 ($11,000) as a nominee director. He told the court “I am aware of my responsibility”, given he paid little attention to the company’s operations. “This is why I am here.”
According to a document cited by public prosecutors during the hearing, Tomiie was also a nominee director at dozens of other companies. He is not accused of any wrongdoing.
While he was rubber stamping documents, Tomiie said that the major decisions at Senjo were largely taken by Henry O’Sullivan, a flamboyant British businessman and long-standing confidant of Marsalek. O’Sullivan is on trial in Singapore over his alleged role in the Wirecard fraud.
Wirecard, which at its peak had a market capitalisation of more than €24bn and displaced Commerzbank from Germany’s premier stock market index, claimed that Senjo generated €384mn of its revenues in 2018, a fifth of its total.
Tomiie told the court that he was not aware that Senjo was equipped with technology and licences to conduct any payments business. Claims made in presentations by Senjo that the likes of British Airways and Burger King were among its clients were probably untrue, he said. “I doubt that we had contracts with them,” adding that he had not seen the presentations.
The court was told that Tomiie’s first contact with Wirecard came in 2009 in Singapore, where he met Marsalek, who harboured ambitions to grow Wirecard’s business in Asia.
Three years earlier, Tomiie had founded E-Credit Plus, a small electronic payments group whose main business was to process credit card payments for his own online cosmetics retailer in Japan. He sold E-Credit Plus to Wirecard, which rebranded it to Wirecard Asia.
Later asked by Marsalek and O’Sullivan to team up to create Senjo, Tomiie told the court he had helped incorporate the company in Singapore while persuading Marsalek to ditch an initial plan to name it after Mount Kōya, a mountain with religious significance in Japan. They agreed to name it after Mount Senjō instead.
Senjo’s initial business was oil trading and O’Sullivan had planned to list the group on a stock exchange, Tomiie told the court, but “this business [of oil trading] was lossmaking and failed after two years or so”.
Tomiie insisted that he had “never put capital into the firm [Senjo]”, which operated a complex network of companies from Singapore to Lithuania. He said he only learnt that a Senjo subsidiary had received more than €200mn in loans from Wirecard after the Germany company’s implosion.
With an interpreter translating his testimony from Japanese into German, Tomiie said that Marsalek ran Wirecard’s Asian business but that he himself had never had any interaction with Braun, who was the public face of the company and has denied the charges against him.
“I attended a few Wirecard summer parties in Munich where I saw him when he gave the opening addresses,” he said. “I knew that he was seen as a tech celebrity and an IT guru, and would have loved to talk to him. But that never happened.”
