Investigation“Swiss Secrets” | Sentenced in 2008 for his role in this case, Eduard Seidel, former executive of the German industrial group, held six accounts in the Zurich bank, of which the courts were unaware.
One year suspended prison sentence and 240,000 euros fine: Eduard Seidel limited the damage. The judgment of the Munich court for corruption of foreign public officials, pronounced against him on October 30, 2008, will not deprive him of his freedom. Mr. Seidel is however one of the major figures in one of the biggest corruption scandals affecting a European company in Nigeria. A case that earned Siemens, the German industrial group, spectacular searches, and resulted in more than 1.6 billion dollars (1.4 billion euros) in fines.
The investigation of the German justice made it possible to detail the role played by Mr. Seidel in this vast enterprise of corruption of Nigerian leaders in order to win contracts on behalf of Siemens, by means of suitcases of cash, luxury watches, but also by paying the medical expenses or the school of the children of some of them.
If Mr. Seidel finally benefited from a rather lenient sentence, it is because the German investigators never found any trace of personal enrichment in these operations. Fourteen years later, the “Swiss Secrets” investigation revives this hypothesis.
Confidential banking data obtained by the daily Suddeutsche Zeitung reveal that Eduard Seidel held no less than six bank accounts, at Credit Suisse, as well as in its former subsidiary Clariden Leu. These accounts, which German prosecutors who worked on the case never heard of, as they told the German newspaper, have brewed a small fortune: at least 54.5 million Swiss francs (34.5 million euros). Amounts that the comfortable salary of Eduard Seidel at Siemens (around 300,000 euros per year) cannot explain.
Bribes and bogus contracts
Eduard Seidel’s first Swiss account was opened the year he took over as head of the telecommunications arm of the Siemens group, in 1985. Five other accounts followed in the following decades, as the German consolidated his interpersonal skills in the upper echelons of Nigeria, one of the main economic engines of the African continent, where Siemens was firmly established. To gain their favors, he shared the table of presidents and senior army officers, visited the offices of ministers and heads of public companies, such as Nitel, the main Nigerian telecom operator.
He himself acknowledged this to German investigators: no public contract could be won without paying 15% to 30% bribes behind the scenes to Nigerian officials – to obtain confidential information on the markets, or even influence the award decision. The practice was all the more uninhibited as the corruption of foreign leaders was for a long time legal in Germany: the under-the-table were recorded in the accounts of Siemens under the heading “useful expenses”, and tax-exempt.
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