AN EMAIL sent from Bournemouth three years ago started Michael Woodford on the road to becoming the biggest corporate whistle-blower in history.

That message ignited the Olympus scandal – costing Mr Woodford his job at the top of the company and uncovering a 1.7bn US dollar fraud.

At the age of 50, Mr Woodford had become the company’s non-Japanese president in 2011. But within months – and two weeks after having the post of CEO added to his title – he received an email from an employee alerting him to a serious problem.

The company had made heavy losses on risky securities more than a decade before. In an attempt to hide the losses, it had paid 1bn dollars for three small companies.

Another 700m dollars had been paid to unnamed people in the Cayman Islands, ostensibly for financial advice.

Mr Woodford had been working on a letter to the Olympus board, urging it to investigate the issue, when he and his wife came to Bournemouth to spend the weekend with friends Hugh Craig and Deborah Leask, both lawyers with Ellis Jones.

He sent the email that Friday night, knowing there would be a response in the morning from Tokyo.

“I hadn’t slept at all well for months, I was several kilos lower in weight, my mental health was deteriorating because I couldn’t sleep,” he says.

After an evening’s good company and “some very good alcohol from Waitrose”, he slept well.

“When I woke up on the Sat morning, [Hisashi] Mori, the vice president who was in charge, ironically, of compliance, acknowledged the email and said basically ‘You don’t have to worry about anything, Michael. What you were saying was covered by an independent committee in 2009’.”

That weekend’s social plans were a “lost cause”, with Mr Woodford setting up an office in the hosts’ kitchen. “I wrote letter number two and letter number three over that weekend. Bournemouth has a special resonance for me because it was here that I started to blow the whole thing open,” he says.

He recalls: “At the time I was just petrified. I was running a business and suddenly I find myself the lead protagonist in a John Grisham novel. I had no experience of it.

“My wife almost had a nervous breakdown. It was the most frightening and disorientating experience, utterly surreal, but I learned more from it than I’ve learned in the 50 years before that about people and the way people behave.”

When he returned to Tokyo, Mr Woodford – a 30-year company man who had successfully headed Olympus’s European operation – was quickly sacked.

But he did not go quietly. The growing controversy would eventually see chairman Tsuyoshi Kikukawa and vice-president Mori imprisoned, cost other board members their jobs, and see Mr Woodford given a reported £10m settlement.

His successful book about the episode, Exposure, is being adapted as a film for producer Simon Cornwell, son of John Le Carre.

For much of 2013, Mr Woodford served on the UK’s Whistleblowing Commission and believes the world is becoming more receptive to whistleblowers.

The Olympus scandal was only uncovered thanks to the person who provided him with information, and whose name he has never revealed.

He points out that he spent £1m in 12 weeks defending himself and exposing the scandal. “What if you were a junior worker in a care home or a junior accountant in a big company and you’ve got two kids and a big mortgage? What would you do?”

Mr Woodford now speaks to audiences around the world for 25,000 dollars at a time, giving the money to charity. But he agreed to speak at an Audience With… event for Ellis Jones for free.

“I don’t know how long I’ll do it, because it is like an exorcism,” he says of the speeches.

“It’s not healthy I think to continually re-live it all the time, but I’ll do it to a point where I feel the story’s known and digested by forums I want to understand – and I’m settling a debt of honour by coming down and doing it at Ellis Jones.”

Whistle-blowers and connection to the press

MICHAEL Woodford says the Olympus scandal has left him with a great deal of respect for the press.

In Japan, he says, “the media is deferential to powerful people”.

He remembers how the Japanese media reacted after the Financial Times broke the Olympus story and it spread worldwide.

“It was the Enron of Japan, and even after that the Japanese media took 10 days before they got to London to interview me – and for those first 10 days they acted like the press office of Olympus,” he says.

“When you work in a society where the media self-censors, it makes you hostile to anything that threatens the freedom of the press to report.”

He says British journalism is full of people who could make more money doing something else.

“If I’m at a dinner, I’ll always choose to sit next to a journalist, because they self-select from that age at university that their overwhelming motivation isn’t getting into that trough of money.”