The multiple dimensions of whistleblower protection
Lessons from the Wirecard case
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51915/ret.193Keywords:
Whistleblowers, Wirecard, Audit, Supervision, FinTechAbstract
The insolvency of one of the great promises of the FinTech universe, the German payment services company Wirecard, was revealed thanks to an ongoing internal leak to the Financial Times. This fact has led to the creation of two committees of enquiry in the German Bundestag and the European Parliament to try to improve the public mechanisms for supervising large digital financial corporations. The role played by BaFin, the German supervisory authority, and Wirecard's fierce defence in an exercise of collective economic nationalism, have been widely questioned in the face of reports published in a British media. The reports commissioned by the European Parliament to various groups of experts, and the academic articles that have been published as a result of the Wirecard case, allow us to reflect on the correct protection of whistleblowers in the midst of the process of national transpositions of European Directive 2019/1937, as well as to defend the proposal that more ambition is needed to encourage this type of actions, in a horizon of growing business complexity, and the rise of a digital economy model that is not always well regulated, opaque and refractory to accountability.
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