A Munich court has named four past Nigerian ministers of communications – Messrs Cornelius Adebayo, Haruna Elewi, Tajudeen Olarenwaju and Bello Mohammed – as well as other officials, an immigration officer and Senator Jubril Aminu, Chairman Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, as having received bribes of about 10 million Euros from the German engineering conglomerate, Siemens AG.
In a court document obtained by the Wall Street Journal the German multinational was indicted by the court for paying millions of Euros in bribes to cabinet ministers in Nigeria, Russia and Libya as it sought to win lucrative contracts for telecommunications equipment.
According to the court ruling that depicted a pattern of bribery by one manager, Mr Reinhard Seikaczek of Siemens, the scandal offers the most detailed picture to date of the scandal that has ensnared one of the world’s biggest conglomerates in investigations across the globe.
The Oct. 4 ruling, according to the Wall Street Journal, by a Munich court named four former Nigerian communications ministers as well as other officials in Nigeria, Libya and Russia as recipients of 77 bribes totaling about 12 million Euros, or about $17.5 million.
Siemens accepted responsibility for the misconduct and agreed to pay a 201 million Euro fine decreed by the court, but it has declined to identify those named as bribe givers and takers in the ruling's text, which wasn't disclosed.
The court focused on bribes between 2001 and 2004 connected to Siekaczek, a former manager in the telecommunications-equipment unit who spent 38 years at Siemens. Siekaczek has been indicted on embezzlement charges in the Munich court, and his lawyer said he is cooperating with prosecutors in their investigation of bribes at Siemens. He is expected to face trial early next year.
Siekaczek has told prosecutors that he knows about bribes beyond the three countries that were made with the knowledge of senior managers, according to separate court records. That testimony could serve as a springboard for other criminal investigations and additional fines in countries where Siemens is active, including the U.S.
Siemens, Europe 's largest engineering company with revenues last year of 72 billion Euros, manufactures everything from light bulbs to high-speed trains. When they carried out a dramatic raid on Siemens headquarters a year ago, German police focused on just 20 million Euros in the alleged fraud. The investigation quickly mushroomed into one of the continent's biggest bribery cases, triggering high-level arrests including Siekaczek and the resignations of the chairman and chief executive earlier this year.
Siemens is still being investigated on several continents. The company said last week it has identified 1.3 billion Euros in suspicious transactions world-wide between 2000 and 2006.
The Munich court ruling, viewed by The Wall Street Journal, lists bribes from 2,000 to 2.25 million Euros steered by Mr. Siekaczek and colleagues to dozens of government officials in the three countries.
It says most of the money, about 10 million Euros, went to Nigerians, including an immigration official, a senator and four former telecommunications ministers: Bello Mohammed, Tajudeen Olanrewaju, Cornelius Adebayo and Alhaji Haruna Elewi.
An official at Nigeria 's Information and Communications Ministry said the government needed to look into the allegations before commenting. The former ministers, said the Journal, couldn’t be located for comment.
Siemens has sold telecommunications equipment in Nigeria , but the ruling doesn't specify what contracts Siemens was seeking when its employees paid bribes. It also doesn't say what, if anything, the recipients of Siemens's money did in exchange for it.
The three-judge panel said its ruling was based on information from interviews with Siemens employees and extensive files of documents. Many of those documents were seized in the Nov. 15, 2006, police raids of Siemens offices in Germany .
Anton Winkler, a spokesman for the prosecutors in Munich , said prosecutors haven't interviewed those who were named in the court ruling as bribe takers. The prosecutors aren't pursuing action against these people because German courts usually don't have jurisdiction if a non-German receives a bribe outside of Germany .
Winkler declined to discuss the precise nature of the evidence, but said, "The names and other information in the decision were carefully checked for accuracy."
In Russia , according to the court findings, 38 bribes totaling about 2 million Euros were funneled to senior managers at nearly two dozen regional state-controlled phone companies stretching from Petrozavodsk in the west to Vladivostok in the east.
The ruling also lists six bribes totaling about 300,000 Euros to two officials at Libya 's state-run General Post and Telecommunications Co. The two officials named are Ramadan Negita, a general manager at the company, and E. Swei Emhemmed Jamel, a project manager.
The Libyan company didn't respond to written questions, and the two managers couldn't be located. A spokesman for OAO Svyazinvest, the state-controlled parent company of Russia 's regional telecommunications companies, said it won't comment on a ruling it hasn't seen.
In some cases, according to the Munich court, bribes were funneled by Siekaczek to government officials through outside consulting firms. In other cases, Siekaczek directed the money from company headquarters to other Siemens officials who acted as intermediaries. Sometimes bribes were deposited in recipients' bank accounts. At other times, the recipients were handed cash.
According to Siemens, many of the 1.3 billion Euros in dubious transactions it has identified lie outside the telecom unit where Mr. Siekaczek was employed.
Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, the U.S. law firm hired by Siemens last December to investigate wrongdoing at the company, flagged 65 countries for scrutiny in an internal document.
(http://www.thisdayonline.com/nview.php?id=95479)
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