Globe & Mail's - Bomber VP NOT guilty - suck it up bashers! A former vice president of Bombardier Transportation’s Rail Control Solutions division is not guilty of aggravated bribery in connection with a business deal in Azerbaijan, a Swedish court ruled Wednesday.
The indictment states that Bombardier and its local partner in Azerbaijan, Trans-Signal-Rabita LLC, and the state-owned Azerbaijan Railways (ADY) colluded to rig the specifications, so the Bombardier-led consortium collected US$340 million. Dollar contract. 2013. An ADY official representing the local partner.
The contract was to install a railway signaling system in the notoriously corrupt former Soviet country.
The former VP, Swedish national Thomas Bimmer, was not aware of any wrongdoing, his defense team told the Stockholm District Court during the trial in November. Neither was he authorized to sign a deal of that scale, he argued.
Prosecutors had called for a prison sentence of around five years, close to the Swedish legal maximum sentence of six years.
Prosecutors argued that for Trans-Signal-Rabita, the deal was worth US$100 million, which is also the size of the alleged bribe. It is the second largest alleged bribe to reach a Swedish court.
Bombardier itself was not charged with any crime. Charges in Sweden can only be leveled against individuals, not companies. Still, the corporation denied wrongdoing.
The decision can be appealed. Even though Mr Bimmer’s release will be upheld, Bombardier’s headache from the Azerbaijan deal is not over.
The project was funded largely by World Bank loans, including preliminary findings said that a mysterious middleman, UK registered shell company Multiserve Overseas Ltd, was used to “funnel bribes”. Bombardier denies the allegations. The World Bank has yet to announce its final findings. The US Justice Department is also investigating the Azerbaijan project.
Multiserve made US$86 million for no apparent commercial reason. The company had no office, no telephone number, and no employees.
Swedish prosecutors argue that the Russian partners behind Multiserv instructed Bombardier to work closely with Trans-Signal-Rabita, but they could not charge anyone in Sweden for the mysterious payment.
The Granthshala reported in November that Russian partners had already been approved in 2010 by senior Bombardier management in Canada, according to a Swedish investigation. The partners have since been involved in a number of deals in former Soviet countries.
The Azerbaijan deal has been tried once before in the Stockholm district court. Former sales manager Evgeny Pavlov, an associate of Mr Bimmer, was acquitted of bribery in 2017. Mr Pavlov, a Russian national, returned to his country in 2020 before the case came to the court of appeals. He didn’t show up. ,
Bombardier Transportation operates its rail control solutions division largely out of Stockholm, Sweden. Bombardier has since sold its railway-related operations to the French company Alstom, but Azerbaijan is liable for any possible damages in the case.
Allegations of foreign bribery are uncommon in Sweden, even though some of the Scandinavian country’s major export companies have been accused of corrupt practices overseas for years.