InvestigationThe Swedish equipment manufacturer has freed itself from the laws in a dozen countries, reveal internal documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
Bribes, embezzlement, jobs of convenience but also suspicions of indirect financing of jihadists in Iraq. The world, associated with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), reveals an accumulation of excesses within the Swedish telecommunications giant, Ericsson, in many countries. Thirty-one international media took part in this survey, dubbed “the Ericsson List”, whose washington post in the United States, the Guardian and the BBC in the UK and the Swedish public broadcaster SVT.
The company has already been shaken by a scandal of embezzlement, the culmination of which was reached in December 2019 with the payment of more than 1 billion dollars (approximately 900 million euros) to American justice in exchange for the prosecution freeze. The facts in question cover the period 2000-2016 in five countries: China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Kuwait and Djibouti. The United States Department of Justice took up the case on behalf of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which applies extraterritorially.
Two years later, an anonymous source provided the ICIJ with three confidential documents that detail a series of other breaches of law and ethics. These internal reports, prepared by the group’s compliance department with the help of the New York law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, establish facts of corruption and bad practices in at least ten additional countries: the Iraq, South Africa, Angola, USA, Brazil, Azerbaijan, Morocco, Bahrain, Portugal and Libya.
Long series of drifts
All these facts are of unequal gravity. But, taken end to end, they show that, in many local branches of Ericsson, it is possible to free oneself, at least for a time, from the rules of the group and the law. And that the Swedish company struggles to apprehend and sanction these excesses.
The first document transmitted to the ICIJ is exclusively devoted to the Iraqi torments of the telecom equipment manufacturer. The internal investigation brought to light payments of bribes, conflicts of interest, out-of-control subcontracting chains. The most serious accusation relates to the indirect financing of militias in the country – and perhaps even jihadists of the Islamic State organization, although there is no formal proof of this.
Ericsson
Founded in Stockholm (Sweden) in 1876 around the telegraph, Ericsson seized the shift in mobile telephony in the 1990s to become one of the international leaders in the telecommunications market. After definitively ceasing to manufacture mobile phones in 2011, the group has refocused on communication infrastructures (antennas, towers, cables, etc.).
Dethroned by the Chinese Huawei in the 2010s, the Swedish group has returned to the forefront of the world scene thanks to the deployment of 5G. Present in more than 140 countries, with 100,000 employees, the Swedish group achieved 22 billion euros in turnover in 2021.
Another document, dated April 2020, sweeps away several cases of potential abuses identified within Ericsson, in around ten countries. Out of fifteen cases examined by the internal investigation, only two (in Croatia and China) were dismissed because they were considered insufficiently substantiated.
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