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CORRUPTION

Allianz pays $12.3 million corruption fine

US securities regulators charged German insurer Allianz SE on Monday with bribing Indonesian government officials, and fined the company $12.3 million for violating overseas corruption laws.

Published: 18 December 2012 06:32 CET
Allianz pays $12.3 million corruption fine
Photo: DPA

The Securities and Exchange Commission said its investigation uncovered evidence that Allianz’s Indonesia subsidiary had made more than $650,000 in payments to officials to win some 295 insurance contracts on government projects.

Allianz “made more than $5.3 million in profits as a result of the improper payments,” the SEC said.

The payments, made in 2001-2008, broke the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which can be applied to companies with US units or whose securities are traded on US exchanges.

Allianz, which has its headquarters in Munich, Germany, agreed to pay $12.3 million to settle the charges, the SEC said.

“Allianz’s subsidiary created an ‘off-the-books’ account that served as a slush fund for bribe payments to foreign officials to win insurance contracts worth several million dollars,” Kara Brockmeyer, chief of the SEC Enforcement Division’s FCPA unit, said in a statement.

The US has stepped up its use of the FCPA to police corrupt behaviour by US companies and companies with US units in overseas markets, with the aim of helping companies that do not pay bribes compete.

AFP/jcw

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MUNICH

Four injured as WWII bomb explodes near Munich train station

Four people were injured, one of them seriously, when a World War II bomb exploded at a building site near Munich's main train station on Wednesday, emergency services said.

Published: 1 December 2021 16:41 CET
Smoke rises after the WWII bomb exploded on a building site in Munich.
Smoke rises after the WWII bomb exploded on a building site in Munich. Photo: picture alliance/dpa | Privat

Construction workers had been drilling into the ground when the bomb exploded, a spokesman for the fire department said in a statement.

The blast was heard several kilometres away and scattered debris hundreds of metres, according to local media reports.

Images showed a plume of smoke rising directly next to the train tracks.

Bavaria interior minister Joachim Herrmann told Bild that the whole area was being searched.

Deutsche Bahn suspended its services on the affected lines in the afternoon.

Although trains started up again from 3pm, the rail operator said there would still be delays and cancellations to long-distance and local travel in the Munich area until evening. 

According to the fire service, the explosion happened near a bridge that must be passed by all trains travelling to or from the station.

The exact cause of the explosion is unclear, police said. So far, there are no indications of a criminal act.

WWII bombs are common in Germany

Some 75 years after the war, Germany remains littered with unexploded ordnance, often uncovered during construction work.

READ ALSO: What you need to know about WWII bomb disposals in Germany

However, most bombs are defused by experts before they explode.

Last year, seven World War II bombs were found on the future location of Tesla’s first European factory, just outside Berlin.

Sizeable bombs were also defused in Cologne and Dortmund last year.

In 2017, the discovery of a 1.4-tonne bomb in Frankfurt prompted the evacuation of 65,000 people — the largest such operation since the end of the war in Europe in 1945.

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