Austrian Defense Ministry Plans Legal Challenge Against Airbus -- Spokesman
February 16 2017 - 3:45AM
Dow Jones News
By Robert Wall
LONDON--Austria's defense ministry Thursday said it would pursue
legal charges against Airbus SE (AIR.FR) over a controversial deal
more than a decade ago to buy Eurofighter Typhoon combat jets.
A spokesman for Austria's Ministry of National Defense and
Sports said the government would bring a case against the European
aerospace giant. Details are due to be presented by the minister
later Thursday, he said.
In 2003, Airbus, then still called European Aeronautic Defence
& Space Co., won a deal for the Eurofighter GmbH consortium to
supply 18 fighter planes to Austria. The combat plane making
consortium also includes BAE Systems PLC (BA.LN) and Leonardo
SpA(LDO.MI).
Suspicions of corruption in the Austrian deal have been raised
repeatedly since 2002, but remained unsubstantiated until 2006,
when a parliamentary committee in Vienna identified chains of
suspect payments apparently related to the Eurofighter sale, but
little evidence of the intention behind the payments.
The parliamentary probe succeeded, however, in raising political
questions that ultimately prompted the Eurofighter consortium and
the Austrian government to renegotiate the sale, including cutting
the size of the purchase to 15 planes. The contract value was
reduced to about 1.6 billion euros ($1.7 billion) from around EUR2
billion.
Airbus Thursday said it couldn't comment on the reports of legal
action, saying it wasn't certain what they were based on. However,
it added "in recent years we have supported the activities by the
legal authorities, for instance through own investigations."
The company in 2012 launched an internal corruption compliance
review amid concerns over the Austrian deal and a British
corruption probe into the action of an Airbus unit, GPT Special
Project Management Ltd., in Saudi Arabia.
-Write to Robert Wall at robert.wall@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 16, 2017 03:30 ET (08:30 GMT)
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