Fugitive tech boss and alleged Russian spymaster Jan Marsalek spotted in Moscow
A fugitive tech boss turned Russian spymaster has been found in Moscow.
Jan Marsalek, who led a UK-based spy ring while on the run from Interpol, has been pictured with a hair transplant strolling hand in hand with his lover in the capital.
It is the first time one of the world’s most wanted men has been seen in public since he went on the run in June 2020 when his company, the German tech giant Wirecard, collapsed with a £1.6 billion hole in its books.
He is wanted for fraud and is being investigated for espionage in a number of European countries, but remains out of reach of the authorities.
However, Russian investigative site The Insider has now pieced together some of his movements using travel and mobile phone data and CCTV footage from the streets of Moscow.
Combat missions in Ukraine
It shows that alongside a mundane life travelling to and from his day job at the headquarters of the Federal Security Service (FSB) he has been travelling to Ukraine to carry out “combat missions” with special forces soldiers.
He has been pictured just four months after his UK-based spy ring was jailed for a total of more than 50 years.
Thousands of messages between Marsalek and Orlin Roussev, who was running the Bulgarian agents from a guest house in Great Yarmouth, were recovered by the Metropolitan Police and revealed plots to kidnap and kill enemies of Vladimir Putin.
Christo Grozev and Roman Dobrokhotov, the journalists behind the latest Insider investigation, were two of the group’s main targets.
It comes after a year-long investigation by the Telegraph revealed that Marsalek was involved in “industrial” espionage of Putin’s critics, the world of Russian private armies, and the clandestine supply of drones for use in Ukraine.
In an extraordinary double life, the tech boss had been working for the Kremlin for at least a decade and had access to a network of spies and police in the UK, the US, Germany, Austria, Israel, Italy, and Switzerland. He then fled Germany for Moscow when Wirecard’s fraud was exposed.
Messages to Roussev revealed that while living as a fugitive in Russia he has been partying with the mafia, spies, and naked women, and having plastic surgery to alter his appearance, including a hair transplant.
He had even been learning the language in order to fit in, he had told his spy-ringleader.
The Insider, who carried out the investigation with the German newspaper Der Spiegel, ZDF, and the Austrian Der Standard, has now discovered that his language teacher Tatiana Spiridonova is now his lover.
Ms Spiridonova, who has been captured on CCTV holding hands with Marsalek, also traveled to Europe to fetch phones and a laptop which had been collected by Roussev’s agents, it is alleged. She is said on her passport application to have “top secret” clearance from the Russian state.
The data also shows that Marsalek has taken five 27-hour long trips to Russian-occupied Crimea since 2023, many of them in the company of special forces commandos of the Russian Spetsnaz.
Phone data has also put him near the Russia-Ukraine border on a number of occasions and records show that he visited the front line in Russian-occupied Mariupol as part of an army sabotage unit.
Security sources told the Insider that he is on combat duty.
It is believed that Marsalek, who is using at least five different identities, has also been traveling to Dubai since 2020, where he has been involved in money laundering and the trade of blood diamonds.
The Metropolitan Police has refused to rule out charges against Marsalek, and investigations in a number of European countries are ongoing into his espionage activities before and after he fled Germany.
He was able to flee Europe despite multiple warnings to the police and security services going back at least five years.
The Telegraph understands that during the trial of the Bulgarians, the Austrian national was still controlling surveillance operations on British soil.
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