Rolls-royce at centre of corruption probe
Awhistleblower at the heart of a bribery investigation at RollsRoyce has been fighting for more than six years for his claims to be heard.
The British engineering group has been accused of handing $20 million and a blue Rolls-Royce car to the son of the former president of Indonesia to help win a contract to supply engines. Rolls shocked the stock market last week when it said it had passed information to the Serious Fraud Office in relation to “concerns about bribery and corruption involving intermediaries in overseas markets”.
The company is one of Britain’s leading manufacturers and is at the forefront of the government’s drive to rebalance the economy.
The announcement from Rolls came after the SFO requested information from the company about allegations of malpractice in Indonesia and China. The request from the SFO is understood to have been made after a series of online posts by a former Rolls employee.
Dick Taylor — identified as a former technical liaison manager for Rolls who worked for the company for more than 30 years before retiring — claims the company paid Tommy Suharto to persuade Indonesian airline Garuda to buy Rolls’s Trent 700 engine for A330 aircraft it had ordered.
Taylor made the claims in comments below articles about Rolls on websites around the world. He has been writing about the allegations since 2006.
Suharto is the son of former Indonesian dictator Suharto and was jailed in 2002 for giving an order to kill a supreme court judge. The Rolls allegations are understood to relate to the early 1990s, when Garuda began ordering the A330.