In an interview with FinanzBusiness in December 2020, Jana Hecker did not mention the name Wirecard. The global head of Equity Capital Markets at UniCredit avoided the question of whether the billion-dollar fraud had harmed Germany’s financial center when it went public. The banker, who previously worked at Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, is apparently one of the big losers in the Wirecard bankruptcy.
She was hired in 2020 by the then Wirecard boss and billionaire Markus Braun to bail him out: After Deutsche Bank had made a loan due and Braun only temporarily got his head out of the bank with an unsecured loan from Wirecard When he was able to pull the noose, he turned to Hecker: She should help him to find new loans to service the Wirecard loan.
Hecker worked day and night: she listed a total of 156.5 hours from March to May 2020 in which she managed to rescue Braun’s personal family office, MB Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH in Munich. She was able to convince the Oldenburger Landesbank and an investment fund of the Rocket Internet founder Oliver Samwer to grant Markus Braun loans.
The situation was quite critical for Braun: He had to raise 35 million euros because the Wirecard Bank had paid him 12.55 percent annual interest on the short-term bridging. But although Hecker offered Markus Braun’s family to defer payment for their work, they were left empty-handed, according to the Financial Times. She is said to have received “not a single cent”, although Braun’s sister Marlies had suggested to her brother that the banker should be paid 790,000 euros.
However, she would not have enjoyed her own alternative proposal either: When Hecker noticed that Braun was short of cash, she suggested rewarding her work with future Wirecard share profits. A few weeks after this proposal from the UniCredit manager, Wirecard was bankrupt and its client, Markus Braun, went to prison for fraud involving billions.
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