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Thales & France Ordered To Pay $830 Million To Taiwan For Bribes In Navy Frigates Deal
Monday, May 3, 2010 At 9:08PM | [Gauri]
http://www.beinformedjournal.com/beinfo ... bribe.html
The French defense electronics group Thales and the state of France have been ordered by an international court (a Swiss arbitration tribunal) to pay $830 million in damages and interest to Taiwan over bribes paid during sale of six warships in 1991. Thales is an electronics company, based in Neuilly-sur-Seine (near Paris) that provides information services for defense and aerospace industry.
BBC News reports: "The panel of arbitrators ordered the payments to make up for unauthorised commissions paid to help Thomson-CSF, which became Thales, win the deal (for the sale of frigates). The contract for the six navy frigates forbade commissions to intermediaries. Thales said its share of the fine was about 27% or $230m (the rest has to come from the state of France), but says that it will appeal against the ruling. The company, which is part-owned by the French state, said it disputed "the very grounds of this decision" by the International Chamber of Commerce's International Court of Arbitration. The French ministry of defence declined to comment.
In the deal, in which the French government played a crucial role, Taiwan's navy bought six Lafayette frigates from Thomson-CSF and the state-owned shipbuilder DCN for $460m each, nearly double the original budget. The suspicious death of the head of procurement for the Taiwanese navy, Captain Yin Ching-feng, who was found floating off the coast of Taiwan in 1993, eventually triggered a corruption investigation. Six former naval officers, including a vice-admiral, were later indicted in connection. In 2001, the Taiwanese authorities filed a complaint alleging that the anti-corruption clauses in the contract had been breached. French prosecutors investigated claims that bribes were paid in the deal, but they were unable to ascertain who might have benefited."
The Thales corruption controversy has been brewing for almost two decades and has taken interesting twists and turns, including the aforementioned murder of Captain Yin Ching-feng, who was about to blow the whistle on these corrupt dealings when he was suddenly found floating in the sea by the local fishermen. According to the timeline of events published by Brian Hsu in the Taipei Times in August 2000, Capt Yin visited three people involved with the ships deal the night of Dec. 8, 1993 and secretly recorded their conversations on a tape recorder.
The very next day, on Dec. 9 he met an agent of a German arms company ( the agent was an ethnic Taiwanese woman with German citizenship), for breakfast. That is the last time (around 8:50 AM) he was ever seen alive. His body was found next day floating off the coast of Taiwan. Navy investigators got the first access to Yin's tapes of recorded conversations on Dec. 11. Two of the three tapes were suspiciously 'damaged', or 'demagnetized'. By Dec. 20, the German arms agent as well an agent for Thales (Andrew Wang) fled Taiwan.
Thomas Crampton wrote in the NYT in Jan., 2004: "The cast of characters in Asia (involved in this controversy) range from patriotic soldiers to shady arms dealers and an aging Chinese beauty queen. In France, a former foreign minister, Roland Dumas, faced betrayal by a mistress whom he nicknamed "Mata Hari."
Investigations into the scandal were hindered by lack of cooperation from both countries, but moved forward after a change of government in Taiwan. The new president, Chen Shui-bian, had called the scandal a national disgrace when he was the opposition leader, and he made solving the case central to the anticorruption platform that helped him win office as the first president opposed to Taiwan's powerful and long-ruling Kuomintang Party.
After Chen turned up the heat, six former naval officers, including a vice admiral, were indicted in connection with the scandal. Taiwan's fear of invasion by the Communist forces of mainland China lies at the heart of the frigate scandal. Split by a civil war that ended with the retreat of Kuomintang forces to Taiwan in 1949, Beijing has never renounced seizing Taiwan by force. Taiwan's ambiguous national status has always hindered arms procurement. By the late 1980's, however, Taiwan's military planners had conceived of a new coastal defense plan that relied on a fleet of small frigates.
The project was well on its way by 1991 when the planned purchase of frigates from South Korea was abruptly dropped in favor of six larger and much more expensive warships built by the French company Thomson-CSF (Thales). The coastal defense plan called for frigates of no more than 2,000 tons, but the Thomson-CSF frigates have a displacement of more than 3,000 tons. In addition, the frigates' $2.5 billion cost made this the largest procurement contract in Taiwanese history.
Nonetheless, Taiwan's military leaders hailed the purchase as an opportunity to obtain high-tech weapons from Europe's largest arms exporter. The frigates included no armaments, but Taiwan received a promise of future sales of French missiles, Mirage 2000-5 warplanes and a variety of weapons that other suppliers could not produce. Taipei's procurement switch was matched in Paris by a major policy reversal. Sales of the radar-evading Lafayette frigates required France to overturn its stated foreign policy stance of not supplying arms to Taiwan. Such a large contract, however, had great appeal in the context of France's rising unemployment and stagnant economy."
The new verdict from the International Court of Arbitration is hailed as a victory for Taiwan, but it does little to comfort Capt Yin's family, who have been fighting for justice for the last seventeen years.
~ Gauri
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"unauthorised commissions", "illicit commissions"....peculiar denominação.
04 MAY 2010 - 05H10
Thales ordered to pay Taiwan in frigate row
http://www.france24.com/en/20100504-tha ... rigate-row
AFP - French defence giant Thales has said it had been ordered by a court of arbitration to pay Taiwan hundreds of millions of euros in compensation in a dispute over a warship sale in 1991.
"Thales has been ordered to pay damages and interest," a company spokesman told AFP.
Thales said in a statement that the total sum involved was around 630 million euros (830 million dollars) including interest and that it would appeal the ruling.
The court of arbitration ordered the payments to Taiwan to make up for
unauthorised commissions that were paid to help Thomson-CSF, the company that later became Thales, win a deal to sell six frigates to Taiwan in 1991.
The contract governing the deal forbade such payments and stipulated that any
illicit commissions would have to be repaid to Taiwan. The contract also said any dispute would be settled by the panel of arbitrators.
Thales must pay 591 million dollars plus interest since August 2001, the Taiwanese navy's lawyer Xavier Nyssen told AFP.
"The preliminary overall estimate is between 800 million and one billion dollars," Nyssen said.
The Thales company spearheaded the sale, but the main stake in the contract was held by the French state-owned shipbuilder DCN. Several sources said the French state would have to pay 70 percent of the penalty.
The French finance ministry and DCN made no comment to AFP on the ruling.
In 2001, French investigating magistrate Renaud Van Ruymbeke launched an inquiry into the massive commissions that were paid in the multi-billion dollar sale of French warships to Taiwan.
During his investigation he received documents suggesting several French public figures had received bribes over the sale of the frigates, documents he concluded were fakes.
Nicolas Sarkozy, now president, was one of those smeared in the documents.
Former prime minister Dominique de Villepin was acquitted in January of having been involved in the attempted smear, but the prosecution has appealed.
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Como mencionado, não há santos neste mercado. Se alguém procurar, vai encontrar escândalos envolvendo todas os fabricantes de armas.
http://www.malaysianmirror.com/media-bu ... -in-france
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jun/07/bae1
http://www.thestandard.com.hk/stdn/std/ ... 4Wd06.html
http://www.againstcorruption.org/briberycase.asp?id=746
http://en.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/1147704
http://www.againstcorruption.org/briberycase.asp?id=857![[003]](./images/smilies/003.gif "Gargalhada")
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