Ericsson fined for dodgy Djibouti dealings and warned over Iraqi indiscretions The US Department of Justice has slapped Ericsson with a $206 million fine for breaching terms of the deferred prosecution deal it struck in 2019 when the Swedish outfit was found to have spent years using illegal business practices. The 2019 deal related to bribes Ericsson arranged in Djibouti, plus breaches of accountancy …
1) the CEO is being a bit cute with his references to historic conduct. The problem that he is paying more than $200m to resolve happened on his watch. Ericsson spent a lot of time and money negotiating a sweet deal that avoided Ericsson being convicted and reducing the financial pain. And now because Ericsson wasn't straight with the Dept of Justice, the company will be convicted (which will make it very difficult in public procurement - like when they want to sell to state-owned telcos), and they will cough up ANOTHER $206 million.
2) Ericsson just laid off 1,400 people in Sweden. How many of those jobs could have been kept if the company didn't have to take the cashflow hit of throwing away another $200 million?
Such a shame they funded dodgy politicians and possibly Islamic State, shareholders (ie your pension fund) lost value, and honest workers lost their jobs - all because some sweaty salesmen wanted to take a shortcut.
"What the effing hell does America have to do with Ericsson doing business in "China, Indonesia, Kuwait and Vietnam."
Ericsson is quoted on NYSE and borrows money in the US. If you don't want to follow US laws prohibiting bribery, then just don't do business in the US...
....I used to work for a company which got taken over (bought) by Ericsson and we all had to do these online "anti-corruption/anti-bribery/anti-taking-back-handers" courses even though hardly any of us had any business dealings of the type which were covered.
Maybe the head honchos should have done the courses as well....?
and Security Sally ;)
The are fed to the employees on a yearly basis since Beancounters took over from Engineers after the Internet bubble.
I also used to work there too... And while 20+ years ago it was a great place, nowadays, the grass is greener elsewhere.
As for which company : Technicolor, Redback, Torrent, ACC ( or one of the many local IT Consluting companies bought when Ericsson tried to create an IBM Global Services Clone ) ?
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