Der Wirecard-Whistleblower

um for whistleblower whistle blow

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you well hello and welcome um I thought we could start with a very simple question we Germans are always interested in the way we are looked at from outside and i' as I've heard yesterday you've been traveling through German for four weeks now quite some time not for the first time but what's your impression of Germany what comes to your mind in the country that changed your life forever in terms of your biography well the beer is definitely the best

and and it has a very strong effect so I'm so happy I bought two Blazers with me because the other one just doesn't fit anymore so that's the impact of one month in Germany okay well um at the moment um there are news about the trial in Munich going on with the wirecard CEO Marcos Brown um did you ever go there or plan to go there and pay attention to the trial and listen to what's going on um no it's always been a

fun idea in my head just to say hello to Marcus Brown um but I I understand the proceedings are mostly in German and it's only as of last week that I was contacted for the first time um by the court directly to finally appear so yeah it might happen at some point in the next few months why did it take them so long to talk to you to get information from you what was going on I mean this has been going on for years now and it's

the first time the prosecutor contact contacted you was last week yeah I mean I guess the prosecutors are not very keen because it's quite embarrassing thing I sent them you know the dossier of information it was about an inch thick um it had an index page it went also to Baffin it went to ey uh and the question I guess my first question to all of them would be which part of this documents that I sent you did you

not understand because I even made it kind of idiot proof right I had an index page I explained everything so yeah maybe that's why they don't want to answer that question and they didn't contact me it was a court director not the prosecutors oh okay okay let's take a trip down memory lane down to the days back in 2017 when you joined wire card and can you remember the very first time when you thought this is strange there's

something horribly going wrong in here yeah the first time was when I was St I think to meet this guy called Ido so Ido was the third most uh powerful I would say Finance person in the whole of wireart what's interesting about Ido is that he was hired directly by the Munich uh by Munich burkart Li the CFO at the time and the thing about EO is he didn't really have a CV that made sense

so if you look at his LinkedIn profile you would see public audit company for four years um it's not named and then one and a half years in rocket internet one and a half years in ardan capital and suddenly he's hired by a multi-billion Euro uh listed company doesn't speak German and he can barely put a meaningful sentence in English together so how did he snag that role and the what's the most exciting thing about Ido at that time was that one of

the first ways he introduced himself was by saying that he's married into a drug dealing family so if that's not a red flag for for me or for any company uh then I don't know what is Right mhm and then you found out the numbers didn't make sense from your point of view maybe can just give us an idea what exactly was wrong I mean if you looked at all the subsidiaries at least in Asia Pacific

none of them were making money they were all in the red um for 5 years at least they were always filing their financial financial statements about a year one and a half years late so how come each time there were eida results quarterly results released where were the hundreds of millions in in profit coming from right cuz the technology pretty much sucked so every time Marcus Brun would say that we are a fintech company all

the employees would actually laugh because you know the terminals were so basic alipe was doing something much better Aden was ahead of the game um technology wise so where was this technology where were the sales um I mean the sales staff were pretty happy I assume because somehow they were getting hundreds of millions of deals in uh so that was that was objectively a crazy way to look at the company and did you start asking questions about about this

at the company or did you just think about it by yourself yeah I mean I asked EO who was very flexible with numbers let's just put it that way uh so one day you know a loss making subsidiary would suddenly have a forecast of multi-millions or wasn't accurately financially you know structured I don't know so he he never had a clear answer but he would always say that he's cleaning up he's cleaning up this and he's cleaning up that he's always on a plane he's always once he even flew to

uh to Munich to Asim headquarters for just one meeting with Yan marcelik right so MH uh yeah you think Ido has been installed from Munich to to take care of the turnover and the profits yeah I mean he was one of the people responsible for um for for doing those things yeah what was the answer from the company officials when you started asking questions within the company what is going on here did they give you any answers or did they just tell you don't

ask any questions please yeah I mean I'm a legal guy so you know focus on your stuff MH don't get into the finance bid but the problem is because I was hired to get licensing done in like Hong Kong Singapore and all these countries finance and legal were very close and we couldn't submit a financial report or of a set of numbers to say a regulator if you're applying for a license and that company is dormant or or just loss making for 5 years mhm so

could you just give us an idea what happened between between the time when you thought there is something horribly wrong here and the point where you like sent like a 1 in thick papers to the buffin and to the prosecutors in Munich what made you do it was it like a fight in with your inner self if you should do it or if there's something is wrong or if it's right what you're doing no so the whistleblowing only happened after I left the company MH right did you leave the company or did uh the company make

you leave well well they Tred to kill me eventually so that's that's what forced the resignation what do you mean they tried to kill you I mean so basically in a very summarized way I'm sure many are familiar with what happened um there was an internal whistleblowing case that came to me so this was a lady in Ido team and she was very afraid of her life um for good reason and after speaking to her I WR I told the Munich legal team like we've got a very serious issue and

they instructed me to investigate the company they gave me access to os's inbox uh head of Finance in Asia's inbox and another guy called James no one understood what James did he was like EOS sidekick um he's in jail now and uh yeah so I had to investigate I brought a top law firm in Raja andan in Singapore and what we saw was just mind-blowing and offensive to a degree because it was very lowlevel fraud so I was expecting more um

and that you know when the general councel finally found out what was happening she got very upset and she ran to the board apparently her feedback was that Marcus Brun was upset as well he's like why are you wasting my time with 30 40 million issues um and then Yan Mar like said Asia is my baby I want to who's this puff guy ask him to stand down he wanted to take over the investigation um and eventually he kind of did so he rolled out a a Anonymous

whistleblowing program which went directly to him so that was scary uh yeah so the company did a whole host of things right like the general counsel and the the CEO in APAC they would shout at me they would intimidate me they created a HR issue against me which took three months to investigate and uh eventually when that didn't work Ido came back he was in he was actually sent to the US and promoted during the Spirit um by Stefan vona

who's also I think on trial now um so Ido said let's go for lunch right and so we went for lunch and he's like hey pav you've been very busy the last few months I was like yeah MH and he said we want to send you to Jakarta mhm I was like why he's like it's a rebranding exercise whether you go in two days in two weeks or in two months you must go mhm so I found that pretty odd and then he said but you don't have anything to worry about cuz you know who my father-in-law is Right mhm yeah so that was a real red flag and then during that

same week two people called me from from Germany we still used landlines at the time and they said U hello is this puff Gill we understand you're being told to go to uh Jakarta don't go you won't come back and they put on the phone seriously yeah so that's when I because I didn't go finally the company had a legitimate reason to say he's insubordinate he's not following instructions and it's on that basis they then forced me to resign SL fired me the next week how serious do

you think this has been did you take it serious at that time yeah yeah of course because Ido was saying a lot of stuff like he said wiard's known to make people disappear and a lot of these things right so he never gave further details but I didn't I mean after four months of hell I didn't want to take that chance anymore so did you when you get calls like this do you as a wh potential whistleblower start doing preparations if something happens to me you need to look at this did you start talking to people or like open a bank

safe put some information in there was there any preparation you did it no I told my mom which which obviously as a lawyer I wasn't very proud of doing but um if anything happened to me I mean she's a single parent and I'm the only child so someone she needs to at least know right if something happens um and then obviously that didn't go down very well with her and she decided that she would find a way to expose this company MH

yeah so the moral of the story is don't upset an Indian mom very nice um well um the some whistleblowers that I've been talking to have taken quite some time to to go out uh with the things that they really have in their mind and the things things that you do know you say sounds like it's been a very St straight line with your life you think this is a fraud this doesn't make up this has to become public it was like a very straight line

if I get that right no it wasn't a straight line because when the company forced me to resign I said okay I'll leave you know wire card you enjoy your fraud I go look for another job right MH um but they didn't stop so even after I left the company they were sending people to follow us they were creating fake job interviews where the interviewer from a friendly wire card company would be not interested in my background skill set but why I left wire card so you'll keep asking like oh

something must have happened you can tell me so I then realized what they were doing they were trying to you knowing that I needed another job they were setting up these interviews so that I said something wrong and then they can Kickstart the process as well and then you know uh it because it didn't stop it kind of forced us to act and one fine day uh my mom told me that hey we're meeting the F this weekend and I was like what are you doing I'm a lawyer okay well in this wire cut case

there have been a lot of people looking into it over 15 years and I think there always was like a common idea it might sound strange but there are so many checks in place we've got the financial regulator we've got the auditor we've got analysts we've got investors it's been a 20 billion company at at some point in history uh bundesbank buffin well uh maybe I'm the Ghost Rider and they are all right have you been at that point because you said it's a low-level fraud it's been a lowlevel fraud were

you absolutely sure about it or did you at some point have some doubts that you might be the Ghost Rider in this case I mean it was lowlevel based on what I saw but the way the company was behaving with the board and all these people taking an extreme approach I realized that the the this thing is really deeper than what it assum what it appears to be mhm and you know once the F got the information it took four months for them to finally publish it and that was the

time which was the most difficult because uh you are kind of in no man's land right where you don't know if they're going to publish is the company still behaving the way they were behaving um against us uh and it was just very difficult so finally when the FD published The Articles and I saw the reaction of Baffin and EU and all these people that's when I realized that it's not about one company but it's actually

about a lot of powerful agencies and and individuals that are for some reason not wanting this to be exposed okay what do you think are the reasons behind that any any idea uh no I don't want to speculate on it I'm trying to keep myself safe so uh but no I don't know but clearly you know it could be it was a fintech daring of Germany like the next PayPal uh it could be that a lot of people had invested in

it you know retail plus sophisticated invest uh investors and stuff and from a ey perspective it could also be inertia right the fact that okay we have signed off for 9 years or 8 years do we now really want to go and say that we we could have been wrong so there were a lot of these potential reasons um what wire card was used for was in my view at least definitely as a conduit to move monies around um between countries but you know we are finding out more stuff

every day mhm what was your personal low in the whole story of exposing this was there any point where you thought I took some decisions in my life that turned my life to the to the worst maybe has there any been any point in this whole thing I mean the lowest point I would say is when right after the Ft articles came out my mom suffered a stroke which was in early 2020 if I got that right

2019 January 2019 and that was a low point because the stress has had really got to her and um that's when you ask yourself like is it worth all these things but then again what do you do either you sit around and you get attacked by these criminals or you stand up and you actually fight back right um so that that was probably the most painful point do you think there's a relationship between some correlation between the stroke and uh she went through yeah cuz she doesn't drink or

smoke and she's quite young she's only 63 this month um so the whole family everyone was shocked and the doctors actually said that uh it was stress induced and as part of the stroke SC to figure out what was going on they found out she had staged two lung cans had a cut off half one of her lungs so you know all that was definitely stress induced and it's it's insane but a lot of people also don't know once the Ft started getting attacked and investigated uh I I reached out to Suda

Zong and they actually flew down to Singapore and and interviewed my mom in the hospital mhm yes never really realized your mom has such an important position in the whole thing you mentioned her a couple of times is she doing okay now after the stroke yeah she is she's actually sitting over there where she is oh there she's waving hi that's very nice okay um well let's

just get back to the whistleblowing issue itself so you wrote how how you do things like that you print them out you make like a big letter and you sent it buffin Bon or prosecut to Munich and you put it to the letter box what do you do how do you do that practically well uh I mean as a lawyer myself I worked at alen overy Clifford chance you know all these firms and we each time a big deal used to close we would have to create what you call a transaction Bible had to have an index

page all the contracts and everything so that's what I did I used those skills finally and I I created uh about an inch thick um with with what I call the fraud transaction Bible snapshot whatever and we decided we will send it and it's very interesting so one of the things that the F told me is that you can't just print documents and send them out because apparently there's like an invisible Trace from the printer itself which can be identified so you print it and then you photocopy it somewhere else

uh so that's what so I told the FD like look why don't you just go do it right so we then decided who to mail these items to uh it was in ey uh Munich prosecutors who yeah didn't understand it um as lawyers which is quite disappointing um and and Singapore as well Singapore actually raided the company right away after the third ft article so they were the only Regulators globally to have acted of course once they raid the company with 30 policemen

at 8:00 a.m. in the morning wire card made a press release saying it was was in a raid we invited the police and and people believed it okay and then what happened after you sent all the stuff you were expecting people to to give you a call and um I mean not me I I never came public until one year after the company crash so that's very important to remember as well this is a very rare case of I would say successful whistleblowing right most

of the time this doesn't happen you know whistleblowers are exposed um identified a lot of bad things happen to them the companies still exist or the fraud still continues so when when these whistleblowers reach out to me and ask me what they should do um I don't have a one answer to them right because each case is so different uh so yeah it it that's just something to keep in mind okay do you think the steps taken since the wire cut blow up are sufficient to

prevent another wire card or to make it easier for whistleblowers to expose things I mean there's a couple of steps that have been taken especially in terms of whistleblowing I would like your like to hear your perspective on the the steps we've taken so far well I mean Financial crime as a whole is not punished strongly enough that's my view right I mean if you look at binance a few couple of weeks ago that guy got away with 4 months paid a

50 million fine and he's worth 43 billion now sitting in jail so the way Financial criminals are being treated it's as though the the message to society is this is a very lucrative career that people should consider because you make a lot of money you do a little sabatical in jail and then you come out and you can retire be a philanthropist or whatever right and that's why a lot of these guys like even in the crypto space they are constantly coming up with new companies

even though bad things happened to the previous ones so I think the message is not strong enough from a whistleblowing standpoint it is upsetting and I've said this in the financial times the way Germany has taken the approach to the whistleblowing ACT is one of the weakest in EU MH you know the fine is about 50,000 which is like some rich Executives monthly pay uh and it's optional to to process Anonymous reports so then what's the

point like most reports would be anonymous uh whereas if you look at say Spain the fines go up to1 million EUR so that's a difference 50,000 1 million and and and so what is the message you're sending have have you said okay we have suffered from wire card seens Volkswagen KX all these things mhm uh and we're going to take a strong approach we're going to make sure the whistleblowing directive is strongly enforced or are you just going to do what what has been happening now

so that's why the messaging is quite disappointing from the regulatory side at least well as we all know Yan maralik is still on the Run believed to be in Russia and a lot of people have not been tried ever since even though they had a pivotal role in the whole structure you help to expose are you still afraid when you go home do you look around somebody's following you or you feel safe no I mean I'm not afraid I've never been that way mhm I I guess I'm the kind

of person that doesn't really process things much so every day I wake up it's the new day let's just move forward right like where's the next coffee I'm going to have and food and stuff but I think if based on the news that keeps coming out the more we understand who Yan Marcel is the the scarier it becomes because as I mentioned in the in the capital magazine article yesterday or the day before I said that it I realized I've kicked up haet Nest not knowing how

big that Nest is and at some point it's best to just say okay let's talk about Lessons Learned and let the legal processes take over because uh yeah it it that that aspect is of of it is getting is getting quite scary the more we know about Yan marle and I've learned that you personally did some things to help prevent other wire cards and you founded a company to help prevent other things like wire card or to expose things like

wire card maybe could just briefly give us an idea what you're doing about the company you founded yeah so I've always asked myself like what is the reason it was me that had to be the one um to expose this company and the whistleblowing sense and I've also seen as a general counsel how poorly companies handle internal reporting cases it could be anything it could be a HR case it could be a cyber security data breach case like it's always so poorly managed um so I've seen it from

that side I've seen it from the whistleblowing side so I told myself why not create a company or a product that would benefit organizations benefit people as well as lawmakers um and that's how I came up with confide and I think confide is a very powerful word because every time you're in a situation where you want to speak up or you want to raise a concern you don't know who to confide in or you're overc confiding in the wrong person or you're not allowed to confide because of legal privilege or ndas and

all these things so I think you know if companies have a sensible solution that secure you can run a full endtoend investigation all within the platform uh there's no loss of audit Trail then I think you know you wouldn't wake up as an executive one day and read about your company in the paper because you would have dealt with it and middle management and all these things wouldn't have blocked it so that's the kind of idea behind the platform basically I want to create less of me so you know you don't need to create organizations don't need

to create angry isolated disgruntled employees who find that because they don't trust what's in the company their only solution is to now go outside external to the press to social media to regulators and stuff I mean you don't need to do these things well we're almost finished I would use the last question the omr is a lot about master classes so can you just give us like a two minute or one minute Master Class

when you are a whistleblower or when you want to expose something what do you have to keep in mind maybe you can give the audience some hints about the journey you've been to what is important to have in mind I mean the first question you should ask yourself is is this worth it right is this really what you want to do because if you do go down that path then there's no turning back you make sure you do it 100% % uh because if you are ever then in a situation where you have been identified you have to be in a you have to be able

to fight back and stand by by what you're doing right so what matters to you is it your family is it finding another job is it exposing a wrongdoing is it speaking up are there ways you could speak up or you could raise this concern without being identified I think these are like real questions every individual should ask themselves um because like I I said earlier on wire card is a very rare case of successful whistleblowing and I only came out a year after the company

crashed so you can see like I didn't come out immediately because I was still waiting for the company to actually die properly uh so they wouldn't be able to then you know take legal action or whatever so that's my message so but yeah but never be afraid to raise a concern it's it's just how you position that concern that is the real skill very last question any regrets or no regrets no I mean I wouldn't be here if I didn't

do it so yeah I mean no regrets at all okay P well thank you very much what you did for corporate Germany uh I think there's a tremendous thing you did maybe could just say a big thank you and um

and um I've talked to PF now last night we've talked here on stage I thought it was always nice to talk to him very interesting and insightful we didn't take any questions because uh we have a tight schedule but he's happy to talk to you he'll be around and you can find him on LinkedIn get in touch with him either if you have a question or if you're an investor in his company absolutely you want to be an investor in this company feel absolutely free and P thanks again was a pleasure thank you thanks

everyone thank you thank you