by Daniel Gauss

The whistleblower in The Insider is introduced to us in a glass booth, evocative of the type defendants sit in at trial in some European countries. We wait for the theater piece to begin by listening through headphones to someone singing Money (That’s What I Want). We will hear everything through headphones. The only character in front of the audience will be the whistleblower/insider and all the voices he recalls and responds to, as well as anything he says, and any other sounds, will be piped into our ears.

The insider is trapped with his own recollections, which we are privy to. How he got trapped with these painful memories, and his way out, are the purpose of this theater piece. He is in the process of remembering and reliving his interrogation by a prosecutor, and other aspects of his life relevant to the Cum-Ex financial scandal he came forward to expose to the German authorities.

Cum‑Ex was a European‑wide tax fraud scheme, carried out from the early 2000s until its exposure in the late 2010s, in which bankers and investors exploited dividend tax loopholes to siphon off billions of euros. Some investigative journalists and researchers estimate that the scheme cost European treasuries up to €55 billion in total, with losses to Germany alone estimated at more than €30 billion.

The headphones mostly bring us voices – often the voice of the prosecutor. Many of the voices are intrusive memories that the insider cannot stop because he cannot answer them adequately due to his moral shame, struggle with denial and ambiguity concerning his own motives: his motives to first object to fraud at his bank, then to participate in the fraud and then to turn the bank in. This inner turmoil may mirror the internal trial, doubt and pain that many whistleblowers endure. Read more »