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Lesotho: Lahmeyer found guilty of corruption
Cooperation with Namibia
8-9/2003
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[ Lesotho: Lahmeyer found guilty of corruption ]
In the corruption case connected with the Lesotho Highland Waters Project, a court in Lesotho has found the German company Lahmeyer International guilty of bribery. According to the court ruling on 17 June, Lahmeyer paid bribes totalling around 150,000 US dollars in the 1990s to the then chief executive of the Lesotho Highlands Development Authority, Masupha Sole. Sole is already in prison, serving an 18-year sentence imposed by a court in June 2002. In another lawsuit, concluded at the end of October 2002, the Canadian engineering company Acres was fined 2.1 million dollars for acts of bribery.
According to a report in Süddeutsche Zeitung, Lahmeyer CEO Rainer Bothe said he found the case against his company incomprehensible. Bribes had evidently been paid by a "freelancer" working for Lahmeyer but this had not been done on the company's behalf. As in the case against Acres, however, the court concurred with the public prosecutor's office, which claimed that the "freelancer" had been engaged as a middle-man for the sole purpose of obscuring the provenance of the bribe. Shortly before the verdict against Lahmeyer was delivered, one of the three middle-men who figured in the trial, South African Jacobus Michiel du Plooy, admitted he had passed on a bribe of 375,000 dollars to Solo on behalf of the Italian company Impreglio. (uke)
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