Dhaka - Bangladesh's anti-corruption authorities have
launched an investigation into alleged bribery by Siemens Bangladesh,
a subsidiary of German corporate giant Siemens AG, a newspaper
reported Friday.
'We have started gathering information from local and global
sources on the alleged bribery,' Hasan Mashhud Chowdhury, Chairman of
the Anti-Corruption Commission, told the New Age newspaper.
Siemens Bangladesh agreed earlier to pay a 500,000-dollar fine to
the United States to help settle a global bribery case.
The fine is part of a 1.3 billion-dollar fine that Siemens AG
agreed to pay to the US and German governments.
Siemens has admitted it spent more than 5.3 million dollars to win
a 40.8-million-dollar mobile phone infrastructure development project
of the state-owned Bangladesh Telephone and Telegraph Board.
Although documents detail the amounts Siemens paid on different
occasions between May 2001 and August 2006, the names of the
recipients were not disclosed, an official at the anti-graft body
said.
Mashhud said he hoped that he would be able to trace the people
who had received money from Siemens.
He said the bribe money might have gone to government officials
through mediators or paid to relatives of high-ranking government
officials.
'We hope an investigation will help make it clear who are the
bribe recipients,' he said.
It has been reported that from mid-1990s to 2007 Siemens was
engaged in systematic efforts to falsify bribe payments in its books
and circumvent internal accounting controls.
Established in 1847, Siemens became embroiled in the bribery
scandal in November 2006, leading to investigations in at least a
dozen countries.
USA
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