A former Siemens AG manager, Reinhard Siekaczek, who implicated four former Nigerian ministers of communications in a bribery scandal is, himself, on trial for bribery, in Germany.

Also, criminal investigations of former Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), for alleged bribery in the construction of Nigeria’s $10 billion liquefied natural gas (LNG) export plant on Bonny Island, have been widened to cover the past 20 years of Halliburton’s operations in Nigeria.

Siekaczek, a former manager at the ICN fixed-line telephone network division, had deposed in court that some former ministers including, Bello Moha-mmed Haliru, Tajudeen Olan-ewaju, Cornelius Adebayo and Alhaji Haruna Elewi (now late) received over $17 million as bribes for facilitating contracts for SIEMENS.

While the court papers revealed nothing about any specific contracts, they however gave details of the amounts received in bribes by the former ministers.

But Siekaczek has also now become the first to go on trial over Siemens corruption scandal that came to light last year. Now 57, Siekaczek is charged with 58 counts of breach of trust in a Munich state court. Prosecutors allege that he set up a complex network of shell corporations that he used to siphon off company money over the years. The money allegedly was used as bribes to help secure contracts abroad by paying off would-be suppliers, government officials and potential customers.
Testifying as the trial opened, Siekaczek admitted having set up slush funds.

The man whose name is synonymous with whistle-blowing in Nigeria said "the whole sectoral management was naturally informed that this function was carried out by me," he told the Munich state court.
"Naturally it was known to me and everyone that we pay commissions to secure orders," he said, adding that they had been handled "very discreetly" with only a very small circle of people in the know.
Siekaczek testified that his superiors had told him to create a new payment system after paying bribes abroad became a criminal offence in Germany in the late 1990s. He said judicial authorities had been on the trail of a previously established system of accounts in Austria.
He said at a meeting with four managers in 2002 he was given the job of organising the payments. "It was naturally clear to all that this does not correspond to the law," he said, adding that their attitude was: "We're not doing it for ourselves, but for this firm."

Siekaczek said he used a system of phoney consultant contracts in order to generate money for commissions. "I saw no other possibility," he added.
The defendant said he did not receive bonus payments for his actions. "I myself derived no benefit," he said. Breach of trust carries a maximum possible sentence of five years in prison. The trial is scheduled to last through July. Siemens has acknowledged dubious payments of up to $2 billion in the wider corruption case uncovered last year.

The company, which makes everything from wind turbines to trams, agreed in October to pay a $317 million fine to end some legal proceedings in Germany related to the scandal. Siemens' own investigation has found evidence of violations across the company and in several countries.

In a summary of a Siemens-commissioned report released April 29, Debevoise & Plimpton LLP said it examined business transactions that took place between 1999 and 2006 and found that "domestic as well as foreign compliance regulations have been violated." Several different countries, including the U.S., Switzerland, Italy and Greece, have launched investigations into suspected bribes to win contracts.
Shares of Siemens were up .06 percent to $112.56 in Frankfurt.

Last November Siekaczek gave a breakdown of what the four ministers allegedly received as bribes from his shadowy consultancy which acted on behalf of Siemens in the following way: Adebayo received 170,000.00Euros between 2002 and 2004 while Haliru got 550,000.00Euros on July 8,2002 and 150,000.00 Euros on August 25,2003.

Elewi, the court papers declared, received a bribe of 200,000.00 Euros on April 30, 2003; 50,000.00 Euros on November 10, 2003 and 5,000.00 Euros August 12, 2002. The court papers further revealed that Olarenwaju received 5,000.00Euros on August 8, 2002.

Also Senator Jubril Aminu and one Mr Chuka Nwizu, an immigration officer were also alleged to have received gratification from Siemens AG. Others include former Managing Director of the Nigeria Telecommunications Ltd (NITEL), Buba Bajoga, who was alleged to have got 80,000.00 Euros on May 3, 2004.

Some NITEL directors including Alhaji Allahba-mulafiya; legal advisors to NITEL, Alhaji Aliyu Datti and Samson Olabiyi and secretary of NITEL tenders board, Mr Olusanjo, were also mentioned by Siekaczek as having received various sums of money in bribes.

Although the court noted that Siemens sold telecommunications equipment in Nigeria, it failed to state what the recipients of Siemens's money did in exchange for it.

Investigators, in the Halliburton case, according to World Socialist Website (WSW), will also probe accusations of embezzlement by senior executives, and Halliburton’s relations with other multinationals, including Royal Dutch Shell.
WSW reported yesterday that Halliburton recently dismissed two of its most senior executives, Robert Stanley and William Chaudin, on suspicion of embezzling $5 million from a Nigerian energy project.

The initial claim, which started the investigation some six years ago, was that Halliburton and others working on a gas export project conspired to win a $5 billion construction contract in 1995 by establishing a $180 million slush-fund to bribe Nigerian officials, and to reward Western contractors between 1994 and 2002, which includes the period when US Vice-President Dick Cheney was Halliburton’s chairman and CEO (1995-2000). Such payments are illegal under a 1997 convention barring “bribery of foreign public officials in commercial negotiations,” adopted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Cheney was also at the helm when, on March 18, 1999, Halliburton and the consortium paid $37.5 million to British lawyer Jeffrey Tesler, who served as a consultant to KBR after it was formed in a 1998 merger between Halliburton and Dresser Industries, which Cheney engineered. This and three other similar payments to Tesler are some of the key points in the investigation by French, British, US and Nigerian police.
Halliburton’s April 25, 2008 quarterly filing to the New York-based Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), which regulates companies that sell stock on public markets, marks the first time that specific evidence was cited to support claims that Halliburton bribed Nigerian officials in violation of the US Corrupt Foreign Practices Act (CFPA) while Cheney was the company’s CEO and, as such, responsible for its books.

According to a footnote in the April 25 filing, US Department of Justice officials told Halliburton that they have “evidence of payments to Nigerian officials by another agent in connection with a separate KBR-managed project in Nigeria called the Shell EA project,” worth some $350 million. The filing also notes that Halliburton and KBR have suspended the agent and another agent who had worked for KBR on “several current projects and on numerous older projects going back to the early 1980s”.
This is the first time that Shell has been formally mentioned in the criminal investigation. The Shell EA oil and gas field is involved in the supply of gas to the LNG export plant on Bonny Island.

In its quarterly filing to the SEC last October, Halliburton said it was subpoenaed by the US Department of Justice and SEC over the use by TSKJ “of an immigration services provider, apparently managed by a Nigerian immigration official, to which approximately $1.8 million in payments in excess of costs of visas were allegedly made between approximately 1997 and the termination of the provider in December 2004 and our 2007 reporting of this matter to the government”.
Accounting irregularities at Halliburton exceeded $234 million during Cheney’s tenure, according to documents obtained by the watchdog group Center for Public Integrity.

However, the lack of media coverage of this issue, especially within the US, is indicative of the fact that it is highly unlikely that the US Justice Department will pursue Cheney over the Nigerian scandal even if the alleged bribery and embezzlement did take place on his watch.