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Gripen plane catches fire on runway

A JAS Gripen fighter plane caught fire after an emergency landing at Kallinge airport in southeastern Sweden at 2.30pm on Thursday. The pilot escaped unharmed and was able to make his own way out of the burning plane.

Published: 6 August 2009 15:18 CEST

Gripen plane catches fire on runway

“It’s reasonable to assume that he’s shaken,” chief of staff Nils-Göran Bernebring told news agency TT.

The fire took hold in the plane’s landing gear when the vehicle had touched ground and was still in motion.

The landing runway has been sealed until further notice. It is not yet known why the pilot was forced to make an emergency landing.

Local wing commander Mats Helgesson described the pilot as very experienced.

“He was out on a flight exercise and was on his way back to Kallinge,” he said.

Helgesson added that there was no information as yet regarding whether or not the pilot had alerted staff on the ground to any difficulties.

Thursday’s crash was the sixth such incident involving the Saab-made planes since their launch in 1993.

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Fresh bribery claims in Swedish jet scandal

A Jas 39 Gripen jet flies above Cape Town in South Africa. Photo: AP Photo/mbr/The Star

Saab's sale of 28 Jas 39 Gripen aircraft – later reduced to 26 – to South Africa has been tainted by scandal and corruption allegations ever since it took place back in 1999.

The Swedish defence giant has always denied any wrongdoing in the deal which was mainly carried out by a subsidiary owned by Saab and British BAE and has said that no evidence of any suspect deals has turned up in its internal investigations.

But according to Sweden's Expressen newspaper, internal BAE documents handed to the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), a UK-based government authority that investigates fraud and corruption, show that money was paid out to shady agents suspected of being involved in bribery.

According to the paperwork, 7.25 percent (or 13 billion kronor – $1.58 billion) of the total sales of the Gripen planes and the British Hawk aircraft was potentially handed over to secret agents. According to Expressen, the claims formed part of a UK investigation into bribery allegations linked to this cash.

Other classified documents published by the newspaper on Thursday suggest that BAE's former head of marketing for South Africa and Asia, Allan MacDonald, told SFO officers several years ago that Saab had been kept informed of all costs and the agents involved.

“I gave them more information than they had ever got before and they were informed about the arrangements with the agents on chief executive level. They knew,” the documents suggest he said.

In a statement to Expressen published on Thursday, Saab's press spokesman Sebastian Carlsson dismissed the claims that almost a billion kronor was handed to agents, but did not deny that large payouts were made.

“There's nothing strange about a person receiving compensation for the work they do. So I mean, that's not the problem, if there is a problem. The problem would in that case be what a person does,” he told the newspaper.

“If it was 7.5 or 6.5 or 4.5 or 10.5 percent [is irrelevant]. That's nothing, that's what it was like 'in the good old days'. But I can tell you that if back then you had these kinds of commission-based contracts in the export industry, the sums could sometimes be high,” he added.

Saab is one of the world's leading defence and security companies and has around 14,700 staff around the world. It is not connected to Saab Automobile.

Earlier this year it was ranked as one of the European arms companies best at tackling corruption by the Transparency International thinktank.

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