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"Wirecard - The Billion Lie" (symbolic picture): the peculiar magic of success
Photo: SFFP / Ness Whyte / Sky
It took Pavandeep Singh Gill less than three weeks to find out about his employer in Singapore.
Although he didn't mean to, just wanted to help.
The specialist in corporate law was hired in 2017 to oversee Wirecard's Asian business.
In the end, it was thanks to his courage, persistence, and information that the dizziness didn't last any longer.
Unlike the RTL docudrama “The Big Fake”, “Wirecard - The Billion Lie” (Sky / ARD) doesn't need any actors, no cold camera filters for Europe and no warm brown tones for Asia.
As a documentary, this film relies entirely on the power of the factual.
To what happened.
To people who were there and want to talk about it.
Who had suspected something, who knew something but couldn't get through with it.
People like blogger JigaJig from Munich, stock market speculator Matthew Earl from London.
And Gill from Singapore, who had been encouraged by his mother to pass his findings on to Dan McCrum of the Financial Times - against whom investigations were then initiated himself.
Matthew Earl felt the same way.
As a punter, he was looking for weaknesses in companies that he could then bet against.
At Wirecard, he saw not only weak points, but "every aspect of fraudulent corporate activity covered: money laundering, bogus transactions, inflated sales."
Whistleblower against the German stock market miracle
Earl personally called the hotline of the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin).
Without success, on the contrary.
Anyone who turned against Wirecard was seen by the authorities as an annoying complainer who wanted to play badly with the German stock market miracle.
That had to be prevented, if necessary with an investigation not against the company, but against the whistleblower.
In a few, but effective, game scenes, the actors play themselves. We see Earl receiving a visit in the evening from strong people whom Wirecard has put on his neck.
We see JigaJig, who, like a man possessed - because he was obsessed - brooding over sketches with connections and cross-references, as if it were a crime thriller.
Because it was a thriller.
more on the subject
Wirecard bankruptcy: insolvency administrator wants 47 million euros back from investors by Tim Bartz, David Böcking and Martin Hesse
Latch controls, missing evidence: special auditor burdens EY heavily in the Wirecard scandal by Martin Hesse and Gerald Traufetter
Chancellor in the Wirecard Committee: Angela Merkel and the white and blue elephant by Gerald Traufetter
And it is far from over.
Benji and Jono Bergmann stage their film around the actors who should bring down Wirecard in the end.
Your struggle against windmills can almost be felt physically.
But it also communicates the lack of understanding how all this could have happened - and whether not auditors, whether BaFin itself could have been part of this financial mafia.
Questions that - hopefully - need to be clarified in court.
But the peculiar magic of success may also have worked with those who could have known better.
"Criminal at heart"
Jörn Leogrande, among other things, Head of Marketing and who has worked for the company for over 15 years, also provides information.
He describes what almost all employees talk about, the shame and incomprehension of having unknowingly worked for an "essentially criminal" cause.
Even Gill believed for a long time that he was doing the bosses in Aschheim near Munich a great service with his research into air bookings, bogus deals and the lack of profits - until he was forced out of the company because of his curiosity, threatened and replaced by Jan Marsalek himself.
His story, if he is caught, would also like to be made into a film.
The documentary "Wirecard - The Billion Lie" can be seen on May 27th at 8:15 pm on Sky Crime, afterwards on demand via Sky Ticket and Sky Q.