Wirecard Makes Deals To Sell Its Brazil, UK Operations

As Wirecard AG’s global operations close following its bankruptcy filing, the German payment company has agreed to sell what’s left, the Financial Times reported.

Michael Jaffé, the court-appointed insolvency administrator, said an agreement has been reached to sell Wirecard’s Brazilian business to Sao Paulo-based PagSeguro Digital, one of the nation’s largest mobile payment-based eCommerce companies.

“It is particularly pleasing that the sale of Wirecard Brazil has been the first success with respect to the sale of assets, because the framework conditions of the Wirecard insolvency proceedings have been, and still are, very difficult,” Jaffé said in a statement.

In addition, he noted that the sale of some of the company’s operations in Britain and North America could be announced soon.

The terms of the Britain deal involve a sale of Wirecard Card Solutions to Railsbank Technology Ltd., the London-based banking and compliance platform backed by Visa, the administrator said. Railsbank declined to comment on the terms of the deal. 

FT reported that Railsbank is planning to purchase Wirecard’s customers, some staff and its payment card technology. The deal could be signed in November, but would require approval of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the United Kingdom’s financial regulatory body that operates independently of the government. 

Wirecard filed for insolvency in June after admitting that 1.9 billion euros ($2.1 billion) said to have been deposited in two Philippines banks did not exist.

Jaffé said he has received offers from several parties for the Wirecard payment processing business near Munich. He also said that sales negotiation for Wirecard North America, formerly Citigroup’s Prepaid Card Services business, is far along.

Earlier this month, Reuters reported that exchange operator Deutsche Boerse plans to remove Wirecard from the DAX index of German blue-chip stocks following a rule change, yet another blow for the disgraced payments company.

Last week, German investigators issued an all-points bulletin seeking the public’s help in finding former Wirecard AG executive Jan Marsalek. The wanted poster issued by the country’s Bundeskriminalamt, the German equivalent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said the 40-year-old Austrian citizen is on the run and “strongly suspected of committing billions in commercial gang fraud” as well as a “particularly serious case of embezzlement and other property and economic offenses.”