The Power of the Small: A Conversation with Wirecard Whistleblower Pav Gill

Taking the first step to becoming a whistleblower is a daunting task, and Pav Gill did so reluctantly. But the soft-spoken lawyer who famously brought down the once-revered German payments firm Wirecard has some inspirational words for those individuals who feel helpless in the face of enormous frauds and the powerful players who perpetrate them.

“It takes nothing but one person to start chipping away at this massive, massive injustice,” he told the audience at the opening session of the 33rd Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference in Nashville on Monday. “Just chip away at the tiny bits, and soon enough people will join you at chipping away at the small. The power of the small works.”

Since revealing his identity last year in the documentary “Wirecard: The Billion Euro Lie,” Gill has been on a mission of sorts to show that sticking up for what is right is worth the trouble, no matter how small you might feel. “We, as members of the ACFE and legal compliance professionals, cannot cower as our very job entails doing the right thing,” he said.

Facing all manner of intimidation including threats to his life, Gill bravely blew the whistle to expose what became Germany’s largest corporate fraud since World War II. In recognition of this valiant act, the ACFE presented him with this year’s Cliff Robertson Sentinel Award, which the association bestows annually on a person who, without regard to personal or professional consequences, has publicly disclosed wrongdoing in business or government.

A Life Turned Upside Down

Gill’s own life was turned upside down when he instigated an internal investigation into what was later found to be a multi-billion-euro fraud at Wirecard after employees in the finance department questioned some of the free and loose accounting practices taking place at the company.

Headhunters recruited Gill to become Wirecard’s first legal counsel for the Asia-Pacific region. He was initially excited to join what was then seen as a growing fintech firm, but within months, that elation turned to deep concern about how exactly Wirecard was generating such impressive revenue streams.

“I have always had a sensitive nose that tells me that something doesn’t smell right, and in Wirecard’s case, the smell was pretty bad from the start. Nothing made sense,” he told an in-person and virtual audience of close to 5,000 people Monday.

Not long after Wirecard hired him in 2017, Gill started casting a skeptical eye on Edo Kurniawan, whom the board handpicked to oversee Wirecard’s international finance operations, since he seemed ill-qualified for the job, said Gill.

Not only was Kurniawan’s finance background suspect, but he hired employees from Indonesia and Malaysia who lacked the requisite experience for the jobs he promoted them to in the finance department. More frighteningly, Kurniawan was fond of boasting that he had married into a family of drug dealers in Indonesia.

Kurniawan, along with Wirecard’s former chief operating officer Jan Marsalek, are now fugitives wanted for their involvement in the fraud Gill helped exposed. But before they went on the run, they made his life hell, and even today loom in the background as potential threats.

Turning Point

Gill christened the fraud probe he helped initiate “Project Phoenix,” thinking Wirecard would rise from the ashes after a few bad apples were eliminated. However, such hopes soon faded after Marsalek took over the investigation. The board then implemented an anonymous whistleblowing program to weed out “troublemakers” in a faintly disguised reference to Gill and others who wished to uncover fraud.

Gill quickly found his credibility under attack, and intimidation tactics became so fierce that he was forced to resign after he refused to go to on a business trip to Jakarta on what he described as a “one-way ticket.”

The threats didn’t stop there. Wirecard executives continued to harass Gill and his mother, who eventually encouraged her son to go to the press. With Gill’s hard evidence in hand, the Financial Times ran a series of articles about Wirecard’s financial shenanigans. Gill also took his story to the Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of the largest daily newspapers in Germany, and used Twitter under a pseudonym “@Laan_Pa” to disseminate information that newspapers were less willing to print for legal reasons.

Fighting back worked. By the summer of 2020, the company finally admitted to wrongdoing after CEO Markus Braun resigned and was subsequently arrested. On June 25 of that year, Wirecard filed for insolvency.

Systemic Failure

Regulators, politicians and stock analysts had all held up Wirecard as Germany’s answer to Silicon Valley, and the stock price had soared as a result. In reality, it was a house of cards, where top executives were conducting “round-tripping” schemes that moved substantial sums of money from the books of one subsidiary to another to give the illusion of profitability. Ultimately, that house of cards collapsed when the existence of $2 billion in cash, supposedly located in bank accounts in the Philippines, couldn’t be confirmed by external auditors, who then refused to sign off on the company’s financial statements.

Gill sees Wirecard as a textbook example of a broad systemic failure, where everyone from regulators to law enforcement to investment analysts failed to carry out their jobs properly.

“Everyone chose to ostrich themselves by sticking their heads in the sand and refused to acknowledge or accept what was going on around them,” he said.

Gill’s mother, Sokhbir Kaur, raised him as a single parent in subsidized housing, working several jobs to ensure that he went to the best schools in Singapore. Gill hopes their story and their determination in battling fraud inspires others in similar situations. When you decide to fight for yourself and what is right, “there is no turning back until that mission is accomplished regardless of how daunting and powerful our opponents may be,” he said.