The employee, Liss-Olof Nenzell was being interviewed by the public radio station following a many-month investigation by two journalists into the illegal payments.
According to Nenzell who was responsible for overseeing payments made by Ericsson to commercial agents, the payments were made via an intermediary based in Monaco in order to conceal the source and recipient of the funds. “It was a dirty payment,” the employee is quoted as saying by the Kathimerini newspaper, “The intermediary was paid so that no one would see the illegal payments.”
The transfers related to the procurement by the Greek MoD of the Erieye airborne surveillance systems, the contract for which was worth 400 million euros and signed in 1999, with the final systems delivered to the Greek air force a decade later in 2009.
Nenzell said that together with a colleague he had travelled to Monaco to transfer the ‘illegal payments’ to the intermediary. The journalists investigating the case claim to have payment orders for 13.8 million dollars dated January 2000.
According to the Ericsson employee the Monaco trip became necessary when the initial payment to the intermediary - reported to be a British lawyer (link in Greek) already known to Greek authorities from other corruption cases - was blocked after it raised flags in Barclay’s bank. The two Swedes then travelled to the offshore haven to ‘unblock’ the payments which eventually passed through a Liberian registered company in Monaco to Swiss bank accounts controlled by a retired military official.
When asked who the final recipients of the payments were Nenzell said,
“High ranking officials in the Greek establishment?”
“Politicians?”
“Yes politicians, officers and high-ranking civil servants.”Antonis Kantas, the former number two official in the MoDs arms procurement department in testimony to anti-corruption prosecutors has already implicated Ericsson as one of the companies that made illegal payments to Greek officials. He admitted to receiving 250,000 euros from the particular former military official for the contract for the procurement of the prime ministerial Embraer jet - which was linked to the Erieye contract - although the former was signed in 2001, according to Capital.gr.
In response to questions from Reuters Ericsson denied that the company was aware that its funds were being used for the payment of bribes, saying that the company had paid the money to commercial agent but had subsequently lost track of it.
"We have zero tolerance for bribes and corruption. At the time, we used agents, but we don't anymore because it is a system that lacks transparency," Ericsson wrote in an emailed statement. "We know that a payment was made to an agent, but we don't know what happened with the money after that. We really hope that the money wasn't used for bribes, but we don't know for sure."While the Swedish Anti-Corruption Prosecutor is said to be looking into the matter, the statute of limitations has expired on any crimes committed before July of 2004, meaning that Ericsson officials could only be prosecuted for bribes paid after that date. Ericsson has since sold its defense business to Swedish group Saab, according to Reuters.
The company has also accused Nenzell of embezzlement and sued him to recover the funds, but these are charges that Nenzell has denied in the past.
"I haven't taken any money. I can certainly guarantee that," Nenzell is reported to have said.Overall the revelations appear to add new information to the ongoing probe by Greek prosecutors into the extensive bribery case affecting the Greek MoD, further implicating Ericsson in the scandal which, as well as top politicians and military officials, was fuelled by a number of German, Russian, French and Swedish companies. (Pressproject)
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