Recent revelations concerning the bribery of the former Secretary-General for Armaments of the Greek Ministry of National Defense, Antonis Kantas, by German and other EU based companies have underlined the need for the EU’s executive body to take action, Greek MEP says.
Thodoros Skylakakis (ALDE, GR) addressed the European Commission with a question about the non –or under implementation- of international and European agreements on bribery and corruption on international level.
According to the apology of Antonis Kantas, he received bribes amounting to tens of millions of euros from more than ten foreign weapons’ systems businesses.
Among others, Mr Kantas received: 500.000 – 600.000 euros for the supply of electronic systems for submarines from the German company STN ATLAS, 600.000 euros to avoid causing problems on the German-Greek transaction for the German Leopard tanks from the company Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, 400.000 euros for the rearmament of the Greek Navy with the French surface-to-surface missiles, Exocet and 240.000 euros for the Swedish artillery-hunting radar ARTHUR from the Swedish company Ericsson.
According to official data presented by Mr Skylakakis and sourced from the OECD's Anti-Bribery Convention, “active enforcement occurred in only four EU Member States and little or no enforcement in 12 EU Member States”.
Moreover, the Greek MEP argues that even in cases were active monitoring and evaluation mechanisms exist the results are not encouraging. “The OECD report on a big EU Member State that has one of the better scores in the TI Corruption Perceptions Index (6th among EU countries in 2011) shows that from 2005 to the end of 2010, 69 individuals were sanctioned, out of which 30 were criminally convicted and 35 were sanctioned under an arrangement under which they only had to pay fines. Out of the 30 convicted individuals, 23 received suspended prison sentences and 4 served time in prison. Among the suspended prison sentences, four concerned individuals convicted for “especially serious” cases of bribery of foreign public officials (cross-border dimension of corruption),” he writes in a recent thematic paper.
As far as OLAF cases are concerned, Mr Skylakakis stresses that according to the responsible EU Commissioner Algirdas Semeta “since the year 2000, 281 out of a total of 647 cases transferred by OLAF to national judicial authorities were dismissed” thus “no further follow-up was given to these cases by the national judicial authorities”. In the rest of the cases the conviction rate is also low “with an EU average of 41%.”
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