A number of former executives from Ericsson have told Swedish radio programme Ekot that the company systematically engaged in bribery in the late 1990s and early 2000s in order to win contracts. An article on the Swedish national radio station’s website says that they allege that Costa Rica’s president at the time, Miguel Angel Rodriguez, was among the recipients.
Most people spoke to Ekot on condition of anonymity, but ex-employee Liss Olof Nenzell worked with the confidential payments and said they were made to high-ranking officials such as telecommunication ministers and telecom utility directors.
Ekot said it had seen documents and heard witness accounts indicating that SEK 2.6 million was paid into a Panamanian account controlled by Rodriguez in 1999. At that time, Ericsson was competing for a major state contract in Costa Rica.
The radio programme said it has spoken to a number of former Ericsson managers, who claimed that the company’s leadership knew about the alleged bribes.
Ekot has spoken to lawyer Peter Utterstrom, which it calls one of Sweden’s leading experts in corruption, who said the allegations would not be too old to interest US authorities. He said there did seem to be a lot of intermediaries for the payments.
Nenzell said it was a matter of tens of millions, by which he seemed to mean Swedish kronor, and to several countries. Nenzell said Ericsson ordered him to destroy all sensitive documentation, after tabloid newspaper Expressen revealed in 2000 that Ericsson ran parallel accounting to disguise payments through front companies.
However, Nenzell did not destroy the papers, and Ekot has seen a great deal of them. They include the names of the final recipients, who are prominent people in a number of countries. Some years ago, Nenzell worked in secret with the US SEC. He has now handed the most sensitive documents to a firm of US attorneys, who will present them to US authorities.
Ekot said it asked Ericsson for an interview but only received an e-mail saying the company has a zero tolerance approach to corruption, and that it denies "generalisations" that it systematically "acted in a way that breaches its own guidelines and principles".
Rodriguez denied receiving any payments, but did admit to a connection to the postbox company in Panama to which Ericsson paid the SEK 2.6 million. He was previously implicated in a similar case involving an Alcatel contract with Costa Rican state operator ICE.
In June, Ericsson confirmed that it was under investigation by the SEC for alleged corruption. The company said it is cooperating with the US authorities in a probe under the Foreign Corruption Practices Act, which began in March 2013.
