The Whistleblower
Who Wrote a Spy Novel

Karl, you have written spy novels. The main one spans the US, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Portugal, Japan. What first pulled you to writing a spy novel?

I have been writing throughout my life — short stories, mostly for myself. Dabbling. With the hope that someday I might write a book. When I was living in Indonesia, something happened that actually gave me the core material: I became a whistleblower in a very large corporate fraud case in the country. And at the time, my neighbour happened to be a book publisher. He knew about it and said, if you ever write a book about this, I will publish it. We made an arrangement around that.

Years passed. I went to live in Australia for four years. Then I found myself here in Malaysia during the pandemic — MCO1. Professionally I had spare time. I thought, maybe this is the moment.

But when I sat down to think about just writing the whistleblowing story straight, I realised it would be a very boring read. Most people already in the know would know the details. And for the wider public, there are already too many whistleblower stories out there. So I decided — since I know Indonesia well, why not use the whistleblowing material as character inspiration and plot seed, and wrap it inside an espionage fiction story? That is a genre I read a lot. And that is how Live and Let Live was born.

And you wrote it in seven weeks?

Seven weeks. Frantically. I was at my desk at six in the morning every day, writing until lunchtime, doing research on the go. I had already found an editor while I was writing — with deadlines to deliver material to them. It was progressing well. And then the announcement came that MCO1 was ending — and my book was not yet finished.

So there I was, quietly hoping they would extend the lockdown. And more or less when MCO1 ended, I finished the manuscript. Final editing, layout, review. And my publisher — who had by then moved to the United States — stuck to his commitment. He made sure it went on Amazon in hard copy and Kindle both. And here in Malaysia, I did a local launch at a few locations. One of the book clubs that took it on was organised by the Belgian Embassy, and we held the review at the ambassador's residence. Ten Belgians around a table discussing the book with the author — that is a very different conversation than most book clubs.

And then came MCO2, MCO3, and apparently another book.

MCO2, everyone asked if I was writing another one. I said I was not ready. MCO3 arrived, I had an idea, I had some research material come my way. This one took three months instead of seven weeks because it covers many more locations — some of which I had never actually visited, so I had to find a way to describe places through research alone. I also tested my digital marketing skills through both books. While writing the first, I made short videos describing what I was working on and posted them on LinkedIn and Facebook. It was a fully integrated project — writing, marketing, audience building. I enjoyed every part of it.

Tell me about this vast life experience of yours — thirty years in this part of the world, multiple countries, consulting, business development, and then one major corporate fraud episode that you could not ignore.

I started in Malaysia — first with an internship which led me into Indonesia, where I then lived in Jakarta, Bandung, and Semarang. Almost twenty years in Indonesia in total. Then Australia for four years. Then Malaysia again six years ago. But through all of that, I was doing project work across the whole region — Mumbai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, Bangkok. Not living there, but going regularly for consulting work.

I worked largely in multicultural, multi-disciplinary teams. Colleagues who had studied medieval German literature, geography, biology — all ending up in management consulting. That experience fed into the books: why would a law enforcement agency want an ex-consultant on an investigation team? Because people from different disciplines see things that specialists miss.

The whistleblowing case was the lived proof of this. I was not a lawyer, not an investigator. I was someone who understood how the business worked from the inside. That vantage point — the person who is present but not categorised as the opposition — is where you see what others cannot or will not see.

What was the personal cost of whistleblowing? Not many people would have the courage to do that — especially in an environment where the system can be quite unforgiving.

The cost is real and it is sustained. It is not one dramatic moment — it is a prolonged exposure to consequence. You lose professional relationships. You become professionally inconvenient to people who would prefer the status quo to continue. And in a region where business relationships are built over years and depend on personal trust and face, making the kind of public allegation that whistleblowing requires carries a relational cost that does not disappear when the legal matter concludes.

What I learned from it — and this went into the books — is that risk rarely appears suddenly. It accumulates quietly. The fraud I witnessed was not the act of one moment of greed. It was the outcome of a long chain of small decisions, small compromises, small avoidances of inconvenient truth. By the time it became undeniable, the system had been accommodating it for years. The warning signs were there long before the crisis was.

Your role at EuroCham has put you at the centre of the EU-Malaysia free trade negotiation conversation. What is your take on where that stands and what it means for Malaysia?

The negotiation is genuinely significant — not just as a trade framework but as a learning process for Malaysia. The European Union has built something that most of the world looks at as a model for how regional economic integration can function. Malaysia has the opportunity through this negotiation to understand in depth how the EU framework works and what its standards require.

Europe already has free trade agreements with Vietnam and Singapore. Indonesia signed in September. Thailand and the Philippines are still negotiating. Malaysia too is still in the process. Once all of these are concluded, there is a possibility — and this is my hope — that the collective experience will push ASEAN to look at its own internal trade architecture and ask: can we lift it closer to what Europe has built? The intra-ASEAN trade picture could benefit enormously from that.

On ESG — this is an area where I think the debate has become too dominated by compliance and reporting. The sustainable development goals, the ESG framework — they are important. But they have started to feel, for many companies, like a box-ticking exercise. And when they feel like that, they stop driving genuine behaviour change.

What would shift that?

A question I encountered at a sustainability summit in Kuala Lumpur — the keynote speaker was the author of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. And his core message was that the discussion had gotten too far in the direction of reporting and compliance. He said the question he asks every government and industry leader is: a world that works for everyone — what does that look like to you?

I have adopted that question. When I am in the right audience, I ask it. Because it forces a very different conversation than ESG reporting does. It brings the abstract back to the human. It connects the systemic to the personal. And I think that is where genuine behaviour change happens — not in the reporting framework, but in the moment when a leader connects the sustainability agenda to something they actually care about at a human level.

Your mandate at EuroCham is ending. Where are you taking your expertise next?

I am staying in Malaysia. Thirty years in this part of the world — my network, my expertise, my relationships are here. My children are half-Indonesian. This is home in the most practical sense.

I am pursuing work in the crossover between sustainability and digitalisation. I have always been interested in technology and how it affects company strategy and operations. And over the last two years, I have been specifically focused on AI. I am part of a small group of men in their fifties who have stopped telling dad jokes and decided to catch up seriously on their AI capabilities. I do AI training every single day. Because I think it is critically important that business advisers understand not just the business applications of AI but its implications for sustainability — for climate action, for resource management, for the kinds of systemic problems that require analytical capacity beyond what human teams alone can provide.

The crossover between sustainability and AI — that is where I want to position myself. That is where I think the most interesting work is happening, and where my combined experience can add something genuine.

My final question for every guest — if you had one wish to make the planet a better place, what would it be?

There are two components. On a societal level — I regret deeply that the world has become so polarised. I have friends across the entire political spectrum. I enjoy sitting with them, listening to what they say, and disagreeing with it, and having them disagree with me. Nobody is yelling. We learn from each other. That is how it should work. But in many countries, the public discourse has become so polarised — and social media plays a significant role in that — that the ability to simply agree to disagree and remain in productive dialogue has been largely lost.

The second component is climate. Unless someone brings genuinely compelling scientific evidence that the climate is not changing, we have to follow what the science tells us. This requires a planetary collaboration — you cannot treat it as someone else's problem when climate change does not respect borders.

But I return to that question I mentioned — a world that works for everyone, what does that look like to you? I wish every person had the opportunity to genuinely reflect on that. And then to carry the answer into the way they behave every day — in society, in business, at home. It could be as simple as recycling your own waste. You do not have to be the CEO of a multinational to contribute. But you cannot say this is a planetary problem that other people must solve. That does not work. We are all in this together — and we all have a role.

A world that works for everyone. Profound, Karl. Thank you so much for being on The Centered Edge. I will have you back when the third book is out.

Thank you very much, Manju. I look forward to it.