Senior Officials at GM’s Opel Unit Resign : Autos: Firm faces what could be one of biggest corporate kickback scandals in German history.
Facing what threatens to become one of the biggest corporate bribery scandals in modern Germany, General Motors Corp. subsidiary Adam Opel announced the immediate resignations of three senior company officials.
Opel said production director Peter Enderle, honorary supervisory board Chairman Ferdinand Beickler and supervisory board member Friedrich Lohr are stepping down “in order to avert harm to the company and to protect Opel from liabilities resulting from public speculation.”
Opel disclosed earlier this month that 65 of its past and present employees were under investigation in what appears to be a massive kickback operation dating back many years.
Early estimates suggest the illicit activity has cost Opel--Germany’s second-largest auto maker--$8 million, although the figure is likely to grow as the probe continues.
Aside from Opel itself, authorities are investigating 179 employees of 40 supplier firms. Police in the town of Darmstadt, who opened the investigation, say they have never seen a case of this magnitude.
The Opel employees under investigation are suspected of taking money and gifts--including vacation homes, foreign trips and house renovations--from suppliers eager to win contracts from the successful car maker.
In many cases, the suppliers are believed to have billed the costs of these gifts back to Opel through falsified invoices.
Fifteen Opel employees have already been dismissed since the investigations began, and more dismissals and resignations appear likely. Opel supervisory board Chairman Ferdinand Schwenger told a news conference on Thursday that among the Opel personnel currently being investigated, 19 are “under concrete suspicion” of having wrongly enriched themselves at Opel’s expense.
The German media have also reported that one former Opel engineer, who had moved on to a job at GM headquarters in Detroit, committed suicide recently, after investigators searched his home and office. The man has not been publicly identified in Germany.
Opel officials have taken pains since word of the alleged kickback scandal broke to distance their company and its American parent from what they say is the “criminal energy” of a few people within “an individual area” of the concern. Hans Wilhelm Gaeb, vice president of General Motors Europa, told reporters on Thursday that Opel would show no mercy in rooting out any agents of corruption it could find.
“No one, but no one, who has behaved unlawfully, will be spared or covered up,” he said.
At the same time, Schwenger told reporters that the board, which met Thursday afternoon, had no evidence of illegal activity on the part of the three departing officials.
