A mother-son combo that exposed German company accounting scandal

By Dan McCrum, Stefania Palma and Olaf Storbeck | Financial Times |

Pav Gill thanks his mother for many things. Sokhbir Kaur raised him alone in Singapore’s subsidised housing, pushed him through the city’s best schools — and, when the time came, forced him to become the whistleblower who would bring Wirecard’s global fraud crashing down.

“It wasn’t me, to be clear. I was just trying to look for another job, and she was busy trying to find ways to expose the company from my sofa in the living room,” the lawyer said from Bangkok, where he is building a new life.

In October 2018 Gill had just been forced out of Wirecard, after senior executives stonewalled an internal investigation into fraud allegations. His mother’s efforts to contact the Financial Times set in motion a chain of events that exposed the German company as a house of cards, forced reform of the country’s humiliated institutions and shattered the reputation of audit firm EY.

When she arranged a first meeting with the FT at Changi Airport, however, Gill remembers simply thinking: “Oh my god, what have you done now?”

Gill agreed to reveal his identity ahead of a Sky documentary centred on the Wirecard whistleblowers, but he still struggles with the label. “I don’t like the term whistleblower, honestly. I think it has some stigma, or negative connotations attached to it. It implies you are going against the company which is feeding you, it involves a breach of trust.”

Back in 2018, the reluctant Gill decided that for the fraud to be properly exposed, he had to be involved. In a series of encounters in out-of-the way coffee shops and Singapore hotel lobbies, he explained to the FT what had happened to him. Kaur, an experienced banker and a first-generation Sikh immigrant with a strong moral code, came along for support — and to insist he be protected.

A magic circle specialist in financial services, Gill was hired in September 2017 as Wirecard’s first in-house lawyer responsible for the Asia-Pacific region, reporting directly to Munich.

Read the full story, ‘Wirecard’s reluctant whistleblower tells his story: ‘They tried to destroy me’’, (FT, 20 May 2021), here.

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