A long fight for justice by a whistleblower in its Singapore office brings down fintech company Wirecard – at a huge personal cost
Pav Gill had a choice: Resign or be fired. It was September 2018, and he had just spent a year as the Head of the Legal Department for the Asia Pacific (APAC) region at Wirecard, a payment processing company headquartered in Germany.
He was in no mood to celebrate his work anniversary as he had been grappling with a series of forgery, round-tripping, cover-ups and other irregularities at his new job – not to mention a death threat. He had been asked to visit Jakarta to attend a presentation in person, by one of Wirecard’s Indonesian entities. Pav refused, as one of the executives implicated in his whistleblowing had boasted of the connections his wife’s family had with drug lords. Days later he was told to leave or be fired.
Wirecard’s growth
Wirecard AG was founded in 1999 in a small town outside Munich. Markus Braun became its CEO in 2002 after rescuing the company from the brink of collapse with a personal investment of 75 million (US$118 million). He also engineered its rise on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, making Wirecard a fintech darling of Germany. Unlike its competitors such as Apple Pay and PayPal, Wirecard offered both conventional and digital payment processing services to large and small businesses, and its multi-channel platform could handle online, mobile, and in-store point-of-sale transactions that its rivals could not.
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