Germany's squeaky-clean business image could be severely tainted this week by the string of corruption allegations at one the country's best-known and hitherto most respected companies, Siemens.
In fact, commentators were asking themselves whether the much-prized German principle of co-determination -- whereby labor representatives make up half of a company's supervisory board -- was not a "license to corrupt," as the daily Die Welt suggested.
The cozy ties between management and unions in Germany had already come under fierce scrutiny in the recent bribery scandal at auto giant Volkswagen where works council members saw the car maker allegedly pick up the tab for plush foreign trips and even visits from prostitutes in return for union approval of unpopular restructuring measures.
But the mighty IG Metall labor union said last week that the Siemens affair was much worse than anything that had been uncovered at Volkswagen.
"It seems that our suspicion that Siemens systematically tried to influence works councils and employee representation is hardening," IG Metall official Michael Leppek said.
As allegations of bribery, corruption and embezzlement snowball at the engineering giant, the arrest last week of a member of Siemens' central management board, Johannes Feldmayer, focused attention on allegations that management tried to build up a small trade union as a counterweight to the all-powerful IG Metall.
Feldmayer and former Siemens finance chief Karl-Hermann Baumann were both suspected of being involved in alleged payments to the head of the tiny AUB labor organization, Wilhelm Schelsky, who was arrested last month.
Schelsky allegedly received 15 million to 20 million euros (US$20 million to 26 million) in bogus consultancy fees, media have said.
IG Metall union has said it was now considering legal action against the company in the wake of the allegations.
At the same time, Siemens is engulfed in a massive slush-fund scandal, where prosecutors allege that company managers siphoned off hundreds of millions of euros in company money to obtain foreign contracts.
Prosecutors this week said they had arrested two more current and former managers in connection with the matter following a series of high-profile arrests at the end of last year, including Siemens' former head of its telecoms division, Thomas Ganswindt.
Prosecutors allege that the employees concerned are suspected of collaborating to open slush fund accounts abroad and of operating a system to embezzle company money.
Prosecutors put the sum held in the accounts at 200 million euros, and some of that money may have been used as bribes to obtain contracts abroad.
Siemens, which itself said it had uncovered as much as 420 million euros in suspicious payments, protests its innocence and chief executive Klaus Kleinfeld is spear-heading a determined anti-corruption drive within the firm.
But as more and more allegations come to light, all such protestations are sounding increasingly hollow and giving rise to suspicions that a culture of corruption was endemic to Siemens.
"Since this week, it is clear how far all Siemens' protestations are away from reality," the business daily Handelsblatt wrote.
"With each new scandal, the question of whether there isn't a `Siemens system' becomes all the more pressing," the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung wrote.
For many, the bogeyman could prove to be Siemens' former chief executive officer and the firm's current supervisory board chairman, Heinrich von Pierer.
Von Pierer, hitherto one of the most respected company executives in Germany, who was even mooted at one time as a possible candidate for president, denies any wrongdoing.
But the executive "stood at the helm of this system for years," said Klaus Schneider, head of the SdK shareholders' association.
"And you have to begin to ask yourself whether any deals at all at Siemens were clean. There appears to have been some sort of dirty-deal culture," he said.
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