Dlife behind prison walls follows a constant routine: wake-up, morning toilet, breakfast, lunch, dinner and time in between for a walk in the yard. As a rule, there is no contact with other inmates while in custody. If co-defendants are housed in the same prison, the prison sergeants are even more careful to separate the prisoners.
For two prominent inmates of the Munich-Stadelheim correctional facility, everyday life like this offers some variety on Wednesday and Thursday. Then Oliver Bellenhaus and Markus Braun spend the entire day in court.
Shortly before nine o’clock they leave their cells and go through a tunnel system into the high-security building on the edge of the extensive prison complex in the south of Munich. A few years ago, the Free State dug a courtroom a good five meters underground using a lot of reinforced concrete.
Defendant in handcuffs
Daylight only comes in through barred ceiling windows. The hall is huge, and with its wooden paneling it is reminiscent of a multi-purpose hall – if it weren’t for the numerous security officers, a security guard with body searches and defendants brought before them in handcuffs.
The Wirecard trial is heard here on two sitting days a week in the fourth criminal chamber of the Munich regional court. One of the most spectacular scandals in German economic history is about alleged commercial gang fraud worth billions, about falsification of accounts, market manipulation and breach of trust in the digital start-up company that was once celebrated on the stock exchange as the German answer to Silicon Valley. And after almost a year and almost ninety days of negotiations, this mammoth trial is increasingly becoming a duel between the defendants Braun and Bellenhaus.
Since December 2022, the two antagonists have been literally breathing down each other’s necks in the courtroom, less than two meters apart: to the right of the presiding judge Markus Födisch in the first row is Braun, the then CEO of the collapsed company. Diagonally behind him was Bellenhaus, who was responsible for the Asian business from Dubai. Now Bellenhaus is the prosecution’s key witness, even when he sits in the dock himself, almost always wearing a medical mask. If he makes a lengthy statement in court, he moves to the front row.
A community of shared fate that completely ignores each other
Bellenhaus and Braun use the few minutes before the door to the judge’s room opens and another day of trial begins for brief discussions with their defense lawyers. During the trial they only answer questions from the judge and the prosecutor.
Even if they form a shared fate as defendants, they completely ignore each other here. Talk about instead of with each other. Don’t greet each other, look through each other. The bankruptcy and almost three and a half years of pre-trial detention have caused the relationship between the boss and a once-close employee to cool.
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