A former executive at German engineering giant Siemens AG on Thursday pleaded guilty to conspiring to pay tens of millions of US dollars in bribes to officials in Argentina, the US Department of Justice said.
The admission of guilt before a federal judge in New York marked a new high point in a decades-long legal saga in which US officials have pursued the company and its executives for a corruption campaign that spanned the globe during the 1990s. Siemens was a publicly traded company in the US at the time.
Eberhard Reichert, 78, of Munich, Germany, pleaded guilty to wire fraud and conspiracy to violate the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which criminalizes bribing foreign government officials to win business. He has yet to be sentenced.
In a landmark case, Siemens in 2008 settled with US and German officials. It pleaded guilty to paying bribes in more than 20 countries around the world and paid US$1.6 billion in fines and the return of ill-gotten gains.
Reichert was one of nine individuals charged in 2011 by the justice department and the US Securities and Exchange Commission for their roles in the bribery scheme.
Former Siemens Argentina chief financial officer Andres Truppel in 2015 pleaded guilty under the same indictment, but has yet to be sentenced.
“Eberhard Reichert tried to sidestep laws designed to root corruption out of the government contracting process,” Manhattan US Attorney Geoffrey Berman said in a statement. “Today’s plea should be a warning to others that our office is committed to bringing corrupt criminals to justice, no matter how long they run from the law.”
Reichert, who left Siemens in 2001 after 37 years with the company, served as technical manager for projects in Siemens’ business services arm.
In 1998, Argentina awarded Siemens a US$1 billion contract to develop identity cards, but terminated the project three years later.
Reichert on Thursday admitted that he participated in a decade-long scheme to pay tens of millions of dollars in bribes to Argentine officials.
Siemens committed to paying nearly US$100 million in bribes to Argentine government officials, members of the political opposition and candidates for office, US federal prosecutors said.
US officials have said bribes were paid up to and including the country’s president, but former Argentine president Carlos Menem has reportedly denied wrongdoing.
Reichert was in September last year arrested while in Croatia and agreed to be extradited to the US in December. Germany generally does not extradite its own citizens.
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