The refutation of wrong doing comes amid revelations that Deutsche Bahn used the same company at the centre of a spying scandal at telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom.

“There is no second case like Telekom,” said Deutsche Bahn’s head anti-corruption official Wolfgang Schaupensteiner in Berlin. He said any comparisons between the two cases were “totally unfounded.”

But the company did admit it worked from 1998 to 2007 with Network Deutschland, the same firm that Telekom illegally used to track thousands of phone calls made by its senior executives to journalists in an attempt to stamp out unwanted leaks to the media.

The business daily Handelsblatt reported in its Tuesday edition that Deutsche Bahn had used Network Deutschland for exactly the same kind of dirty work that Telekom had. Citing an unnamed security expert, the paper said Network “gets data that one can’t actually obtain legally.”

Schaupensteiner rejects such claims and said that Deutsche Bahn had not ordered Network to access information that was not public and that there was no evidence that the firm used illegal methods.