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CRIME

Deutsche Bahn sacks employees in foreign bribery scandal

German national rail provider Deutsche Bahn has begun firing employees at their subsidiary DB International following an international corruption scandal, the company said on Thursday.

Published: 8 July 2010 10:20 CEST
Deutsche Bahn sacks employees in foreign bribery scandal
Photo: DPA

“We have separated ourselves from a number of leading employees in middle management,” a spokesperson told daily Berliner Zeitung.

The DB International workers are suspected of bribing foreign decision makers in Algeria, Rwanda, Greece and beyond to gain contracts.

“The suspicion of illegal payments has hardened so that we’ve taken the first difficult consequences,” the spokesperson said.

In addition to sacking the workers suspected of wrongdoing, other related contracts with consultants and freelancers have ended.

The spokesperson estimated that the alleged payments amounted to the “middle-single-figure millions,” the paper said.

The bribery cases are believed to date back as far as 2005, and the company informed the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office last year about its suspicions, discovered during internal review.

Deutsche Bahn also hired professional services firm KPMG to perform a special investigation into the subsidiary.

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CRIME

Teenager turns self in after attack on German politician

A 17-year-old has turned himself in to police in Germany after an attack on a lawmaker that the country's leaders decried as a threat to democracy.

Published: 5 May 2024 12:52 CEST
Teenager turns self in after attack on German politician

The teenager reported to police in the eastern city of Dresden early Sunday morning and said he was “the perpetrator who had knocked down the SPD politician”, police said in a statement.

Matthias Ecke, 41, European parliament lawmaker for Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats (SPD), was set upon by four attackers as he put up EU election posters in Dresden on Friday night, according to police.

Ecke was “seriously injured” and required an operation after the attack, his party said.

Scholz on Saturday condemned the attack as a threat to democracy.

“We must never accept such acts of violence,” he said.

Ecke, who is head of the SPD’s European election list in the Saxony region, was just the latest political target to be attacked in Germany.

Police said a 28-year-old man putting up posters for the Greens had been “punched” and “kicked” earlier in the evening on the same Dresden street.

Last week two Greens deputies were abused while campaigning in Essen in western Germany and another was surrounded by dozens of demonstrators in her car in the east of the country.

According to provisional police figures, 2,790 crimes were committed against politicians in Germany in 2023, up from 1,806 the previous year, but less than the 2,840 recorded in 2021, when legislative elections took place.

A group of activists against the far right has called for demonstrations against the attack on Ecke in Dresden and Berlin on Sunday, Der Spiegel magazine said.

According to the Tagesspiegel newspaper, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser is planning to call a special conference with Germany’s regional interior ministers next week to address violence against politicians.

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