Pav Gil Helped Bring Down Wirecard. His New Startup Aims to Shield Whistleblowers From Harm
In September 2017, Singapore-based lawyer Pav Gill took a job at Wirecard, a high-flying German payments business worth tens of billions of euros. Not long after he started, he heard from a colleague that an executive at Wirecard Asia, the region Gill was responsible for, had allegedly been teaching staff how to trick auditors into thinking the firm had money it didn’t have. Gill quietly began an investigation, codenamed Project Phoenix. The results were damning: Wirecard had been fudging its numbers. But when the board of directors caught wind of his work they got “very upset,” says Gill. He was ordered to stand down, and his investigation came to nothing. The head of Wirecard Asia began to make Gill’s life “pretty horrible,” he claims, yelling at him in front of colleagues and attacking the quality of his work. He was effectively forced out. But before he left, in September 2018, he loaded a harddrive with an 85GB payload of email data tied to the investigation. It was filled, he says, with “irrefutable” proof of wrongdoing. …