Atlas ordered to pay for bribery case

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – German prosecutors have ordered Thyssenkrupp’s Atlas Elektronik GmbH to pay to the state about 48 million euros that it was found to have earned from contracts in Greece and Peru. The Bremen prosecutor’s office said in a statement yesterday that it suspected employees of Atlas, a maritime technology company, paid a Greek middleman more than 13 million euros to win submarine sonar system orders. Some of that money ended up in the pockets of Greek officials after having been funneled through accounts in London and Switzerland, it said. In addition, the prosecutor’s office said it found evidence of bribes to a middleman in connection with the sale of torpedoes to Peru’s navy. It said it had found a manager of Atlas, whom it did not name, had committed a negligent breach of his supervisory duties. That manager no longer works for the company. “The managing director is accused of having failed to set up effective compliance controls to prevent the violations by employees of Atlas Elektronik GmbH,” it said. nance minister Andrej Babis, the frontrunner for October’s general election, said in an interview published yesterday. “The eurozone was an economic project [that] became political. And I don’t want to guarantee Greek debts, Italian banks. I don’t want to be part of this system because it will bring us nothing good,” he told the CTK news agency.