“KMW secretly paid the consulting firm of two former parliamentarians of the SPD party over 5 million euros between 2000 and 2005,” the article writes, stressing that this, “was revealed in the context of an internal investigation related to two deals to supply armoured vehicles.”
The investigation was launched at the behest of KMW itself following allegations over bribery payments related to the company’s dealings in Greece.
The article adds that over the last decade the company had contracts worth about 2 billion euros to supply the Greek government with Leopard-2 tanks and howitzers.
Those contracts were largely prepared and signed during the same years that, according to the investigation, the 2 SPD politicians, Dagmar Luuk and Heinz-Alfred Steiner received payments worth millions of euros from KMW via the company BFS,.
The Greek connection
“BFS” is short for “Consultancy for South-east Europe” Sueddeutsche Zeitung explains and adds that Luuk was a member of the German Parliament from 1980 until 1990 and had close connections with Greece, while Mr Steiner was a member of parliament from 1980 until 1994 and also served for a period as the vice-president of the Defense Committee.
For the investigation KMW hired the firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) which concluded in its findings that the purpose of the paymentσ was not clear.
The investigation was launched following the confession of a former procurement official of the Greek Defense Ministry at the end of 2013 who stated that he had been bribed over the tank deal by Greek consultants working for the German firm.
Silence from KMW
The Prosecutor in Athens is conducting an investigation into the dealings of the procurement official and other suspects in Greece as well as into the roles of a former KMW manager, according to the German article. It also notes that the German Prosecutor ‘Munich I’ is currently conducting an investigation into potential tax fraud by former collaborators of the arms company, as bribes were falsely declared and had been illegitimately claimed as tax deductible business expenses. It is not clear if the findings by PwC for Luuk and Steiner have been passed on to the Munich Prosecutor.
“The fact that payments to the longtime MPs of the SPD came to light during the internal investigations of KMW over the armoured vehicle contracts raises the suspicion that this money was used to influence the order placed by Athens,” the paper writes, noting that, neither KMW nor the two former MPs “wanted to comment on whether a part of the funds was given, for example, to politicians of the then governing Social Democratic PASOK party in Greece.”
The paper concludes with the observation that while months ago the firm had declared that it had neither paid any bribes nor given any order for such bribes to be paid, KMW now refuses to answer questions on the matter.