A former employee of Ericsson, the Swedish ICT company, said that the company bribed Greek policymakers to secure a large defense deal.
Liss Olof Nenzell spoke at the Swedish Radio News and said that just before the turn of the millennium Ericsson sold to the Greek state a military radar system called Erieye. The deliveries of the military system continued for over ten years. The deal was worth over 400 million euro. According to the former employee the company used bribes to secure deal.
The bribes passed to the Greek policymakers through a go-between used as a decoy, in Monaco. Liss Olof Nenzell said “that this go-between was going to allocate the money to people no one should know about.”
Liss Olof Nenzell said at the Swedish Radio News that the final recipients were “politicians, generals and senior civil servants.” Swedish Radio News announced that it had obtained secret internal documents from Ericsson which indicated two so-called payment orders dating back to January 2000, totalling $13.8 million.
According to the website, on one of the occasions a large sum got stuck in a bank in Monaco. Liss Olof Nenzell, who at that time served as a kind of troubleshooter, travelled together with Ericsson director Yngve Broberg to Monaco to help release the money. The go-between was afraid. "Yes, he was so nervous, he was so terribly nervous about this whole thing. He feared he wouldn’t be able to live up to his part in transferring the money," Liss Olof Nenzell said and added that the company’s director was nervous about his physical safety. Ericsson has accused Nenzell of embezzlement and sued him to recover money. Nenzell has denied the allegations in the past.
Ericsson director Yngve Broberg claims he did not know for whom the money was intended. He has declined to be interviewed by Swedish Radio. However, the Swedish Radio met legal expert Nina Macpherson, who is General Counsel at Ericsson but she stressed that she could not say what happened in Greece. "I can say this, if there were bribes we didn’t know anything about them," Ms. Macpherson said.
Antonis Kantas, a senior manager at the department of defence has admitted to receiving more than $15 million in bribes from big corporations in relation to arms contracts. He has also admitted receiving a bribe from Ericsson's agent in Greece.
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