DPO Pay, a Dublin-based digital payments provider founded in 2006 by Eran Feinstein and Offer Gat in Dublin, has received approval from the Bank of Tanzania to operate as a Payment Service Provider. Focused on African markets, DPO Pay attracted attention when it was acquired by Network International (NI), a Dubai-based payments provider, in September 2021 for $291.3 million. The acquisition’s timing, initially planned for the fourth quarter of the previous year, was later revised to the third quarter of the current year.
However, the acquisition stirred controversy in the international media. In 2013, a former top executive of Wirecard, Dietmar Knoechelmann, sold his German-registered payment processor AconaOnline (AO) to DPO for an undisclosed amount. AO shared a registered address with Inatec Solutions GmbH, a company associated with Knoechelmann and Ruediger Trautmann, another former Wirecard executive who left Wirecard in 2010.
Curiously, DPO had its offices at the same Dublin address where Knoechelmann served as CEO of Wirecard Payment Solutions Holdings Ltd.
G Direct Pay Holdings Limited, the holding company behind DPO, was incorporated with Liam Grainger as secretary and Bob Richmond as its director. Both also served as directors of Greymountain Management Ltd (GMM), the operator of a vast binary options scheme of the notorious Cartu brothers. In 2020, the US CFTC filed a fraud complaint against GMM and its operators.
In 2016, the Israel Credit Card Company (ICC-CAL), under the control of Israel Discount Bank, faced criminal charges related to the fraudulent processing of payments for adult content and gambling sites between 2006 and 2009. In a plea deal, Dietmar Knoechelmann admitted to assisting ICC-Cal and its senior executives in committing fraud as part of a plea agreement in Israel.
It is essential to note that the ICC-CAL credit card fraud was unrelated to Wirecard. However, Knoechelmann was a top executive at Wirecard and CEO of Wirecard Payment Solutions Holdings Ltd during that time. The situation was likened to an executive from Deutsche Bank being caught in a crime while representing another bank, as reported by The Financial Times.
