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.
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