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Europe's most wanted man plotted my murder and that of my colleague

A jury at the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court, has just found six of my compatriots — citizens of Bulgaria — guilty of conspiring with the Kremlin to kidnap and possibly murder me and my colleague and friend, Roman Dobrokhotov. The Bulgarians, the jury acknowledged, had been recruited and run by former Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek, who first came to my attention when I investigated his disappearance from Austria and subsequent re-emergence in Moscow in 2020. For years, while no one seemed to be watching, Marsalek had quietly siphoned off billions from the publicly traded German company where he worked as a top-level executive, leaving a gaping hole in its balance sheet. In parallel, he had equally quietly volunteered his services to Russian intelligence — including to the same FSB unit that Roman and I had proven was behind the August 2020 poisoning of Alexei Navalny.

We exposed the real identities, flight logs, and phone billing data of multiple FSB operatives who had trailed Navalny across Russia before ultimately administering a near-fatal dose of the Soviet-era nerve agent onto his underpants after breaking into the opposition figure’s Tomsk hotel room. I’d soon learn, thanks to a police raid more than two years later, that on the same day our story broke, Jan Marsalek — already under the FSB’s protective umbrella following his midnight escape to Belarus in June 2020 — had fired off an encrypted message to one of his longtime Bulgarian associates, Orlin Roussev. It’d be a cool project.” That week, I was spending time with my family at our summer house north of Varna on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast, and Roussev reported with pride that his team had located my villa — an achievement that would have required nothing more than a peek into the publicly accessible real estate registry.

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