Wärtsilä Bribery Case:

Wärtsilä Bribery Case: The Cliff Notes with links to sources.

• Wärtsilä makes natural gas power plants.
• Wärtsilä bribery case involves a  group manager who was charged with giving bribes to the CEO of a leading electricity distribution company in Kenya in 1999–2001 in exchange for favors during and after negotiations for a power plant.
• This was Sweden’s most scandalous bribery case. The public prosecutor has declared that “it is clear that Wartsila offered bribes to secure orders”. According to Wartsila the payments were surely made…
• Wartsila paid about EUR 1.1 million in two installments, one in year 2000 and the other in 2001 to the private Swiss bank account of Bo Pettersson.
• According to a blog that focuses on Wärtsilä: Bo Petterson was found dead in his cell just before the court’s decision on the bribery case. (I was not able to confirm this with another source.)
• The manager agreed to pay the CEO because a person—who remained a complete stranger to the Manager and whose name he did not remember—had at his own initiative, approached him at a hotel in Nairobi…
• Charges against the Wärtsilä manager in the Wärtsilä Bribery Case were dropped by the Court of Appeals because the prosecutor did not show that the manager:
  • had personally participated in the effecting of the payments (Wärtsilä’s foreign subsidiary had effected the payments in agreed stages as prescribed by the consultancy agreement);
  • had known at the time of concluding the consultancy agreement—or at the time of the payments—that the Kenyan CEO was the owner of the offshore company; or
  • had known or should have known that the Kenyan CEO was a foreign public official. source
• Had the timing been different in this case, it might have turned out differently.

Wärtsilä and Denton, Texas: The Cliff Notes

• Wärtsilä makes natural gas power plant engines.
• Denton Municipal Electric (DME) is lusting after two natural gas power plants as part of their “Renewable Denton Plan” (RDP) and only Wärtsilä engines will do. DME has shown no interest in GE or Caterpillar engines.
• Last August, DME employees, Jim Maynard and Will Bunselmeyer, traveled to Portland, Oregon, to attend Wärtsilä’s symposium.
• Ira Shavel is a consultant with the Brattle Group who was also in Portland last August as a featured speaker. His presentation made the case for Wärtsilä’s natural gas-fired power plants as more wind and solar energy operations get built. (Brattle Group speaks often at Wärtsilä events and wrote a white paper for a group supported by the oil and gas industry.)
• Wärtsilä representatives were in Denton in May 2015 visiting with DME officials.
• City Manager, George Campbell, supplied three consultants for an “independent” review of RDP but he highly recommended the Brattle Group so they were chosen by council.
• The Brattle Group recommends natural gas power plants for Denton and shrugs off charge to explore 100% renewable options as “too expensive.”

Please read the material at the links and do your own research. Hopefully the Denton Record Chronicle will do more in-depth reporting on this.

Also please read: Internal Audit Reveals Corruption at Wärtsilä

Be skeptical.