He was a top executive. He blew the whistle — twice

On a Friday afternoon in April 2022, Mark MacGann sat alone at the kitchen table in his farmhouse in the south of France and wrote a LinkedIn message to a journalist he had never met. He had been listening to podcasts about Russian oligarchs and their enablers in London — lawyers, politicians, lobbyists, accountants — and felt he had something to contribute. He did not say much, only that he had “lived experience” to share and wondered if the journalist — me — might take a call.

MacGann had spent the previous two decades in the upper echelons of corporate power, brokering deals and political influence from Moscow to Brussels and New York. He had advised on Martha Stewart’s insider trading case and helped Uber bulldoze its way through regulation, as the company’s chief lobbyist in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. At Veon, the telecommunications conglomerate with operations in post-Soviet markets, he had been dubbed “foreign minister” by a principal shareholder, the Russian oligarch Petr Aven.

Veon paid MacGann a salary of €900,000 and a bonus of €900,000 to smooth its path into international markets. “I enjoy the things money brings,” MacGann told me. But now he was alone in his house, once part of a viscount’s estate, with two boxer dogs and a cache of files that he claimed, if released, would raise new questions about how Veon — and Aven — operated under the scrutiny of a US-imposed reform programme.

Aven told me he had limited knowledge of Veon’s day-to-day affairs and “utterly” rejected any suggestion that he would have “considered ever being involved in a corrupt activity”. Veon said it had “done all the right things in terms of establishing and sustaining high ethics and compliance standards”.

It was not the first time that MacGann considered exposing a company. Less than a year earlier, he had come forward as the whistleblower behind the Uber Files, a leak to The Guardian of more than 124,000 internal documents exposing the tech giant’s lobbying, influence peddling and rule breaking across multiple continents. That decision had already cost him professionally and placed him under legal threat. Now, after another personal reckoning, he was considering doing it again. “I’m not standing up pointing the finger,” he told me. “I played the part. With Veon, I came on with my eyes open. I was attracted by the silly money and the mission.”

There have been whistleblowers who exposed corporate malfeasance, whistleblowers who leaked state secrets and whistleblowers who were crushed by what came next. What makes MacGann unusual is not just the scale of the companies he decided to expose, the power of the individuals who ran them or even the allegations against them. What is unusual is that he chose to do it twice. Once could be explained as grievance, regret, self-preservation or idealism. Twice requires something else.

MacGann grew up in Ballyleague, a village on the River Shannon in the Irish Midlands. It was an “idyllic” setting, he recalled. “But poor, white and straight.” One of his brothers had cerebral palsy and, as there was no adequate professional help available in the area, MacGann and his other brothers took on carer roles. It was one instance where he became visibly emotional when speaking, a reminder of how naturally he talks. “I can talk the hind leg off a donkey,” he later told me. “I always have three teeth chasing each other.”

Like his brothers, he attended the nearby Christian Brothers school, where he co-founded its first student newspaper, The Eagle. Across the road, the Convent of Mercy girls filed past in blue blouses. Before he knew he was “gay or anything else” he fell for one of them. He went on to Kingston University in London, then Sciences Po in Paris, before launching into the world of lobbying and public relations. He worked first in Brussels and then at Brunswick in New York, where he was guided by the founder’s mantra, “never assume”.

When he got to Uber in 2014, his brief was to help it grow across dozens of jurisdictions that had long-standing rules about who could operate a cab. The company’s strategy was not to wait for permission. His job, as he saw it, was to go over the heads of local officials, win over ministers and then manage the consequences, which came quickly.

In Brussels, Uber had begun operating without licences, bypassing the city’s traditional taxi system. Drivers loitered outside Brussels Midi station to pick up passengers who would otherwise queue at the regulated rank. In April 2015, MacGann was recognised at the station. He was cornered by seven taxi drivers, protesting against Uber, insulting him and spitting at him. Soon his address appeared on an anti-Uber Facebook page. The company assigned bodyguards to ferry him around, “like a drug dealer”, in a blacked-out Mercedes.

At the time, MacGann tried to downplay the toll the situation was taking on him. “I have had bodyguards full-time now for five months and it is becoming very stressful,” he wrote in an email to a colleague. But not long after, he informed senior colleagues of his intention to resign. He left in February 2016, describing his departure as amicable.

Uber publicly praised his work and asked him to stay on as a senior board adviser through the summer. A year later, no longer working for the company, MacGann was again recognised at Brussels Midi and, he said, harassed by a group of taxi drivers until the police showed up. He received an anonymous Twitter message shortly afterwards, saying: “One day police won’t be there and you’ll be alone.”

As a result of this stress and then the death of a close friend, MacGann was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He began therapy, and for the first time in his professional life he unplugged. He said the process forced him to see the company, and his role within it, differently. He began to feel that Uber pitted employees and taxi drivers against each other for financial gain, with little care about the harm it would cause.

While MacGann said he “left €12mn in stock on the table” when he left Uber, he did receive a €550,000 settlement after a legal dispute relating to his remuneration. And he kept his laptop, his work-issued phone and various other documents from his time as a board adviser. It was this material, not the stock options or the settlement, that would shape his future.

In the spring of 2020, as the first Covid-19 lockdowns spread across Europe, MacGann withdrew to the south of France. He was meant to be in between things — working out his next move after Veon, advising a few start-ups, but “I crashed and burned,” he said. Then his dog, Jagger, died choking on a resin ball, despite MacGann’s attempt to save him by performing a tracheotomy with a razor blade while following instructions provided by a vet over the phone.

During the period of forced reflection that followed, he had what he described as a “come-to-Jesus moment”. He began to reassess his entire career and what it was for; what he was for. He had subscribed to the missions of Uber, then Veon, but was now questioning how much of it had been self-delusion.

He reconnected with people from earlier in his life, including his childhood crush from Ballyleague. Over Christmas 2021, she visited him in France, bringing her sister, a reporter with The Guardian. He began to talk about his time at Uber and how he felt, despite its shiny image, the company was exploiting drivers and running roughshod over regulations. As he had convinced the media and governments that Uber represented positive change, he felt he wanted to correct the record. It was through her that MacGann was introduced to Nick Hopkins, The Guardian’s investigations editor.

When MacGann later spoke to Hopkins, the journalist did not ask for files. He asked about MacGann’s health. Whether he had children. Whether he was prepared for what whistleblowing might bring. MacGann said he had recovered physically by that point. He had no spouse, no children. Just the files.

The Uber material wasn’t something that could be forwarded in an email. The cache included three laptops, six hard drives and two dozen Moleskine notebooks filled with contemporaneous notes, representing his records of meetings, calls, documents and personal impressions. He did not want to carry them through airport security all the way to the paper’s London offices. So in January 2022, he packed the entire archive into two Rimowa suitcases and climbed into a black van for the long drive to Geneva. The team of journalists met him at La Réserve, a lakeside hotel just outside the city.

For two days, they sat in a hired meeting room with harsh lighting, low ceilings and whiteboard walls. “Initially, they were reserved, even sceptical,” MacGann recalled. “I was saying, ‘Here’s what I did at Uber, here’s what I know.’ I remember [Hopkins’ successor] saying, ‘Mark, with respect, it’s not what you remember or what you think that’s interesting. It’s what’s in the data.’”

Once pandemic restrictions eased, the team began visiting him weekly in France. They copied hard drives, photographed notebooks and pressed him for detail. “I was essentially a research assistant,” he said. In June, they flew him to London to interrogate his motives one last time. Why now? What changed?

He had been asking himself the same questions. In his telling, it was less a conversion than an excavation, unearthing a long-buried part of himself. The stress at the end of his time at Uber, the pandemic forcing him to step off the corporate hamster wheel, his illness, his reconnecting with friends from home — it all returned him to the boy from Ballyleague who wanted to do something important with his life.

In July 2022, The Guardian ran the story and named him as its source. In an interview at the time, MacGann expressed regret for being “part of a group of people which massaged the facts to earn the trust of drivers, of consumers and of political elites”. He called it his moral duty “to speak up and help governments and parliamentarians right some fundamental wrongs”. His life had changed again and not quietly.

After the story went live, messages started coming in. Some expressed concern for MacGann’s wellbeing, others congratulated him. But “I was ghosted by the corporate world,” he told me. Back in France, he had the view, the dogs, the old Moleskines in their boxes, but he was no longer being sought after as a start-up adviser or to serve on corporate boards.

Uber, in its response to the leak, acknowledged “mistakes and mis-steps” but said it had since undergone a transformation, involving “an extremely robust compliance programme”, under new leadership since MacGann’s time at the company.

Publicly, MacGann’s story was one of vindication. He was praised in profiles, invited to conferences and to testify to various European parliaments. He said he was thrust into a “world I barely knew existed of investigative journalists, human rights lawyers, pro-democracy organisations. People who speak out when they see wrongdoing.” The glamour of Davos had been replaced by speaking engagements at conferences and universities. For the first time in his career, he was no longer acting on behalf of a company. He was speaking for himself. And he was also, for the first time in decades, not earning a regular income, living off the money he had made at Uber and then Veon.

Privately, MacGann was facing what whistleblowers often face: isolation, uncertainty about what comes next and risk. The legal threats from Uber — €30,000 for every day of alleged breach of his confidentiality agreement, a sum that by his estimate had grown to €40mn on the day his interview was published — hung over him. “Most countries have little or no effective laws protecting whistleblowers,” Stephen Kohn, a leading US whistleblower attorney, said. “The greatest danger is retaliation.”

What happens to whistleblowers after they go public depends on who they are, what they reveal and where they live. Some receive government protection or financial rewards. Under the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which prohibits American-linked companies from overseas bribery, Kohn said that “whistleblowers have obtained hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation”. Others lose their careers, homes and health. A few, like Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, become global symbols, praised and criticised in equal measure. Jeffrey Wigand, the tobacco executive who revealed his company’s suppression of cancer data, became a cautionary figure and a Hollywood character. Sherron Watkins, who flagged irregularities at Enron, struggled to find a job for years. For every name the public remembers, there are dozens more who become exhausted, blacklisted or broke.

But MacGann has landed relatively well. He told me that Uber has not yet sued him for an alleged breach of his confidentiality agreement, but neither had the company withdrawn its initial threat to do so. He is a fellow at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, researching the tech industry and labour laws. “The money’s all gone,” he said of his corporate earnings. “This is my first regular pay cheque since Veon.”

When MacGann joined Veon in 2016, Russia had already annexed Crimea. But there were other issues with the oligarch-owned company, then called VimpelCom. It was under the watch of a US Department of Justice-appointed monitor, after admitting to paying bribes worth $114mn to the president of Uzbekistan’s daughter for telecom licences in the central Asian country.

As part of its deferred prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice, Veon accepted a $230mn criminal penalty and agreed to forfeit another $850mn — then the largest recovery ever under the US Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative. The company also promised internal reforms, under the monitor’s supervision, and to co-operate with US authorities investigating any other corrupt activities that might surface during the agreement’s duration.

According to a company document, Veon was already co-operating with the monitor on internal investigations into historic matters, including potential judicial bribery in Ukraine, improper payments in Algeria, Bangladesh and Kyrgyzstan, and fraud in Russia. Any further criminal acts, deliberate misinformation or inadequate compliance would expose the company to prosecution under US federal criminal law.

To outsiders, Veon’s reform was high-stakes. To MacGann, it looked like a challenge worth taking on. The hiring process had felt like a courtship. He met the chief executive, Jean-Yves Charlier, over sushi in Amsterdam. The company’s founder, Augie Fabela, flew him to his gun room in Wisconsin. The chairman, Alexey Reznikovich, was meant to host him on a yacht off Sardinia, though the meeting was eventually moved to the Hotel de Russie in Rome.

It was there that Reznikovich explained the scope of what Veon needed: someone who could steer it through the final years of the deferred prosecution agreement and reshape its international presence. MacGann signed on. His remit as a member of the company’s global executive committee was sprawling: government relations, communications and legal messaging.

One of his first moves was to rebrand the company. VimpelCom, a name still associated with the Uzbek bribery case, became Veon. The new name was launched at the 2017 Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona. There were new logos and speeches as part of the repositioning as a “tech-first” company. In the background, the monitor remained in place. But in MacGann’s view, compliance leaned heavily on process and documentation — PowerPoint decks, formal training and paperwork — while struggling with implementation. He found himself constantly at odds with the Russian executive team. He described it as a war of attrition, a daily grind of tactical pushback — who should be hired, how public statements were phrased, what counted as a conflict.

Veon told me that its reform programme was “reasonably designed and implemented in good faith” to prevent corruption, and that it had “never been a ‘slide deck’ or ‘box-ticking’ exercise”.

There were moments when MacGann thought progress was being made, but mostly it felt like papering over cracks. He began to keep records, assiduously — emails, meeting notes, slide decks, memos, messages — “in order to brief the monitor and also for self-preservation”. The documents piled up and so did the crises.

One flashpoint brought tensions into the open. In 2017, after Veon’s chief accountant in Kyrgyzstan was detained on tax fraud charges, the company’s head of operations across Eurasia, Mikhail Gerchuk, proposed enlisting Petr Aven to secure his release. Using a major shareholder to act at Veon’s behest could bypass the company’s usual vetting as applied to staff. But, under the FCPA, Aven would still be an agent of the company, which would expose Veon to liability for any promise or payment he made on its behalf.

Aware of these risks, the company’s general counsel insisted that any approach involving Aven must comply with FCPA and anti-corruption controls. MacGann chimed in, saying the situation should be handled by Veon’s head of government relations, not Aven. “This is fundamental to the proper functioning of any company,” MacGann wrote to his colleagues, “and even more so one which carries the obligations of being publicly traded, operating under a [deferred prosecution agreement].”

Gerchuk shot back: “Please stop political battles and preventing us in doing what we believe can be helpful for releasing our employee from Kyrgyz prison.”

Aven told me Veon did contact him about the Kyrgyzstan episode but he “didn’t approach anyone in connection with the matter”, and that he “never paid anyone on behalf of the company”. A former Veon executive said the chief accountant was released after roughly four weeks, with no further charges issued.

MacGann called it his duty ‘to speak up and help right some fundamental wrongs’

Later, there was the hiring of Vladimir Senin, a pro-Kremlin Duma member and a lobbyist who was known for his closeness to Aven. It was Aven who recommended Senin to Veon and, a few years earlier, to Uber. MacGann had in fact crossed paths with Senin at Uber, where he was hired to secure political support for the company’s expansion into Russia, despite internal concerns. In one internal email, headed “Senin and FCPA”, an Uber executive wrote that lawyers were “rightly concerned about bribes being paid to grease the skids . . . need to make 200% clear to Senin that any bribes will not be tolerated”. Another person working for Uber wrote that he found it “strange” that Senin wanted his fee of up to $650,000 to be paid to Tecknologii Business Communicatsiy, a Russian company created on the day Senin signed his contract. (Uber said it no longer operates in Russia and that it retained Senin for less than a year, resulting in one payment of $300,000.)

The FCPA treats bribes paid through middlemen as if the company paid them, so leaning on a well-connected individual — especially one charging a high fee — is considered high risk. No evidence has emerged of bribes being paid by Senin or Tecknologii Business Communicatsiy on behalf of Uber or Veon.

In 2017, Veon executives were considering engaging Senin to help navigate regulatory challenges in Moscow. “It was like groundhog day,” MacGann said. To him, the same red flags applied. And Senin was again engaged through the same company, for a fee of $225,000 for nine months.

A compliance memo, circulated at Veon, outlined three explicit risks: Senin’s close ties to Aven, this closeness as the source of his appointment, as well as his political status under the FCPA. The memo stated: “Senin’s role as a Russian official raises a risk of liability for VimpelCom under the FCPA’s Anti-Bribery Provisions, should he abuse this position in order to provide some undue business advantage.”

Aven told me he recommended Senin to both Uber and Veon as a government-relations specialist “prior to his election to the Duma”, describing him as “honest and serious”. He said he had “no financial relationship with Tecknologii Business Communicatsiy” and “no personal interest” in promoting Senin. Veon didn’t address Senin specifically, but it told me its third-party due diligence and oversight were strengthened during the monitoring.

Veon brought in external counsel to evaluate the Senin arrangement. It acknowledged the risks, but concluded they could be mitigated. As long as the paperwork was in order, it seemed to MacGann that Veon and the monitor would be happy. Senin’s appointment was finalised on January 20 2017.

Ten days later, MacGann sent a message on WhatsApp to Veon’s general counsel: “I’m not in a comfortable place about us using [Senin] as our Russian lobbyist, no matter what the legal report says,” adding: “We have a discussion tonight I think.” The in-house lawyer replied, “Definitely needs discussing.” The discussions didn’t change anything. MacGann said he felt he couldn’t continue objecting to Senin, as he had just started at Veon and thought to himself, “People in Russia do business in that way.”

The same day Senin signed his lobbying contract with Veon, the daughter of Uzbekistan’s prime minister came back from maternity leave to resume her role at Unitel, Veon’s subsidiary in Tashkent. She had first joined the company in 2007 as a marketing specialist but was later moved into a department that handled interactions with state authorities. By 2014, she was working on the country’s government relations team, the very area that had landed VimpelCom in trouble.

The company’s own documents openly acknowledged who she was: the daughter of Abdulla Aripov, a longtime telecoms regulator who had previously served as deputy prime minister and was dismissed after allegedly issuing telecom licences illegally. In December 2016, he was appointed prime minister.

The moment she reappeared on Veon’s organisational chart, internal alarms went off. MacGann received messages from Marine Babayan, Veon’s director of government relations, informing him that a report was being prepared for the monitor. The woman, Babayan said, would be reassigned away from sensitive work. But shortly afterwards, she corrected herself: under local labour laws, the employee could not be removed from her role without her consent. Instead, the company would provide additional anti-corruption training and ask her to sign a pledge promising not to use her family ties for the company’s benefit.

There is no evidence that the prime minister’s daughter acted improperly or that her father intervened in her employment. A former Veon executive said her role did not involve decision making or direct contact with officials. The company didn’t address her case, but said it “remained transparent and co-operative with the compliance monitor and the DoJ throughout the monitorship”.

MacGann insisted on her reassignment. In March, he emailed his colleagues, saying that based on “extensive discussion” at a company conference and the “realities of the [deferred prosecution agreement], I think you need to reiterate the need to do this very swiftly”.

For months, the issue festered. In May 2017, Veon’s general counsel emailed Gerchuk to remind him that she still needed to be moved. The lawyer had already issued this instruction once. But Gerchuk now confirmed she was still in her post, still in government relations, still handling official correspondence — just not, he claimed, dealing with officials directly. MacGann was alarmed. Veon was already under scrutiny from Dutch regulators for its operations in Uzbekistan, particularly for allegedly selling dual-use telecoms technology that could facilitate human rights abuses.

The argument dragged on until July, when the monitor was due to visit Tashkent. Veon’s general counsel asked for an immediate reassignment of the prime minister’s daughter. Local executive Dmitry Shukov said that he informed the monitor of the reassignment, to which Gerchuk replied: “We must complete this reassignment ASAP.” But a former executive said she chose to resign voluntarily, resolving the matter.

Two days after Shukov’s report, another email circulated from Gerchuk. It began: “Dear all, Today Petr Aven and I met with Uzbekistan Prime Minister Abdulla Aripov and the Minister for Communications . . . ” MacGann doesn’t have access to the email’s whole body. Aven told me that after the meeting he “took no further actions and had no further discussions regarding Veon”, and that he was unaware until I contacted him that Prime Minister Aripov’s daughter worked at Unitel. A former executive who was present at the meeting said that the issue of Aripov’s daughter wasn’t discussed, and that the meeting was about the prime minister’s decision to reduce the spectrum allocation of Beeline, Veon’s Uzbek subsidiary.

Even though there is no evidence that Aven’s meeting discussed Aripov’s daughter, MacGann said the timing of the meeting raised questions for him. To MacGann, Veon was speaking the language of the FCPA, but making decisions that suggested a different mindset behind the scenes. A document with Babayan’s name on it, dated October 2016 and titled “Uzbekistan Lessons-Learned”, shows Veon planned to rely on Aven for “advice/support” with the Uzbek government. In this document, Aven was in the “stronger influence” category and placed under the heading of “Russia” alongside the Kremlin’s ambassador to the country. Aven told me that Veon regarded him only as a shareholder with experience engaging authorities in the region and that, apart from the Tashkent meeting, he did not participate in negotiations for the company.

By mid-2018, the battles had taken their toll on MacGann. Ursula Burns, who had taken over as chief executive, brought in new communications staff and MacGann said she urged him to dismiss some of his team. He resisted and, eventually, negotiated a settlement. He signed the paperwork, packed up his notes and left. Burns, who left Veon in 2020, said she couldn’t discuss Veon matters with me “due to confidentiality protocols”.

The deferred prosecution agreement would formally conclude the following year. Veon described the reforms it had made as “enduring” and said that it has “further strengthened” them since. But in the boxes MacGann took with him were his records of the time, showing a reform process long on paperwork and short on certainty, despite the threat of serious criminal action. MacGann described the monitorship, which he lived through for two years, as “very artificial, contrived and complicated”, adding that “it was a mundane box-ticking exercise”.

When MacGann was listening to podcasts about Russian oligarchs in London, before he first messaged me on LinkedIn, the Kremlin was two months into its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Aven and Senin had been sanctioned by western governments over their alleged support of the Kremlin. Aven told me that “the UK and the EU have abandoned these allegations,” noting a judgment in his favour at the EU General Court, and that he continues to contest remaining measures. Veon told me Aven has had no connection to and has derived no financial benefit from the company since he was sanctioned.

MacGann, meanwhile, was about to publicly blow the whistle on Uber and, with an eye on Ukraine, said he came to feel he should be “an asset to the people who root out the bad guys”. He messaged me on LinkedIn, starting our discussions about Veon and Aven, who has not been accused of criminal wrongdoing in connection with Veon’s post-settlement conduct.

The Veon documents did not appear to be the same as Uber’s. They lacked the shock value of real-time political influence or the appearance of western corporate hypocrisy. The Veon material was more complex and harder to explain, and perhaps harder to care about. Which made MacGann’s decision to go public again harder to understand.

In many ways, the legal and political environment had also shifted against MacGann. In early 2025, days after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the new US administration paused enforcement of the FCPA. Trump had publicly called it a “horrible law”, arguing that it disadvantaged American companies abroad. “Although the emphasis on FCPA prosecutions has declined, the US is still pursuing approximately half of the pre-Trump-initiated investigations,” Kohn, the whistleblowing attorney, said.

For companies such as Veon, the risk calculus shifted. What had once been a matter of urgency was now, increasingly, left to corporate discretion. For MacGann, the equation had changed, too. The Uber Files had cost him his career in corporate strategy and left him living off savings. He had already passed the point of no return. Still, he was not naive about what another disclosure would mean. While the Veon documents were not as headline-grabbing, they traced a company that had been under US monitoring following a major corruption settlement, and whose principal shareholder — a now sanctioned oligarch — publicly denied ties to the Kremlin, and denied leveraging his political influence. “We try to be absolutely out of politics,” Aven had said after being sanctioned.

Aven told me regular contact between major businesses and government ministries “takes place in every country and does not constitute ‘engaging in politics’”, adding that neither he nor his partners “ever had any financial relations with the Kremlin, let alone any illegal ones”.

In MacGann’s view, Aven operated in a system where business and political networks often overlapped. He said this shaped how decisions were made inside Veon, as with the Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan episodes. MacGann did not allege illegal conduct by Aven. But to him, what mattered most was the system the Veon files revealed: how international corruption investigations are managed, monitored — and, in the end, put away. If that wasn’t worth exposing, what was?

At Harvard, MacGann gives talks about what he has seen and what he has done. He said they are “based on the life of an insider from the corporate world, to show how greed, hubris and lack of oversight can lead bright people to do shady things”. It is a phrase that still carries the rhythm of a lobbyist, maybe because it is about one.

Paul Caruana Galizia is an FT investigative reporter

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