Three Siemens subsidiaries operating in China were alleged to have been involved in bribing government officials and hospital executives to win contracts ranging from urban trains to health-care facilities, United States court documents showed.

The transport arm of the Munich-based industrial conglomerate paid US$22 million from 2002 to last year to obtain projects of seven subway trains and signal facilities in China, worth more than US$1 billion, according to the US Securities and Exchange Commission's litigation documents to a court in Washington this week.

All the funds were allegedly paid to purported business consultants or relevant agencies in Hong Kong before they were passed to Chinese officials, said the SEC.

A Hong Kong consulting firm and its four subsidiaries allegedly asked Siemens to pay US$11.7 million for a project in an east China's city.

Meanwhile, Siemens Power Transmission and Distribution allegedly used the same method to win two high-pressure power transmission projects, worth US$838 million, in south China. Siemens PTD allegedly paid Chinese officials about US$25 million from 2002 to 2003 via purported consultants.

Siemens Healthcare was suspected to have paid five Chinese hospitals US$14.4 million from 2003 to last year to help it win orders for health-care facilities worth US$295 million. It allegedly paid the former head of the radiation department at Songyuan Hospital in northeast China's Jilin Province US$64,800 in May 2006 to sell a US$1.5-million magnetic resonance imagining system to the hospital, the SEC said.

The money was paid to a US bank account and transferred to a middleman account in a Singapore bank. It was approved by the chief financial officer of Siemens Healthcare (China), according to SEC. The former head was given 14 years in jail in China on March 8 for taking the money.

(Shanghai Daily December 18, 2008)