Villa Alfons

Annegret Lopez, journalist at the Capital Times Germany, has a suspicion: could it be that the payment service provider InstaCard’s meteoric rise on the stock exchange, its rapid expansion into the Asian market and the enormous assets it has recorded are not completely above board? She starts investigating CEO Markus Schwartz and board member Jens Marlicek and comes across more and more inconsistencies. At the same time, Karin Lindhardt, Schwartz’s secretary, also becomes suspicious when examining the balance sheets of kiosks in the Philippines that have allegedly made millions in sales with payment cards from a bus company. But InstaCard’s reputation in the industry leaves no room for doubt, the competition believes in the company’s nose for really good deals, and the financial regulators simply cannot imagine that anyone there could have fraudulent intentions. Meanwhile, in the Villa Alfons in Munich, Marlicek has long since built an empire of fictitious banks, falsified balance sheets and abstruse business models together with the businessman Faydon Cowler, who is also the prime minister of Akkomachinga and managing director of AkkoPay, and Lothar Leyfeldt, an ex-secret service agent – with a clear conscience, because how can something be illegal that does not exist? 

In Villa Alfons, David Gieselmann takes the case of Wirecard AG, one of Germany’s biggest economic scandals, as the starting point for a dizzying trip into the abysses of finance, unscrupulous fantasies of omnipotence and the limits of a corrupt virtual money system.