Airbus to Pay €1bn in Corruption Settlement

Airbus will pay nearly €1bn (£840m) to settle corruption cases with UK authorities.

The deal follows a lengthy investigation by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) into the aircraft maker's use of middlemen to secure plane deals.

The settlement is part of a €3.6bn (£3bn) deal that also involves payments to US and French authorities.

The payments are being made under a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) a type of corporate plea bargain.

The French national prosecutor, the Parquet National Financier, (PNF), will receive about €2.1bn, while Airbus will also pay the US Department of Justice some €500m.

The settlement was announced earlier this week and was approved by courts in the three countries on Friday.

The European planemaker, based in Toulouse in south-west France, employs more than 130,000 people globally, including about 10,000 in the UK.

The SFO, and later its French counterpart, opened investigations into Airbus in 2016 after the firm reported itself and asked regulators to look at documentation about its use of overseas agents.

In the run-up to the SFO's investigation, UK, French and German authorities froze export credit applications by Airbus, but reversed that decision in 2018.

Export credits are used by many governments to support exporters, often by giving their backing to bank loans offered to overseas buyers of UK products.

In the past, they have proved useful in giving cash-strapped airlines the ability to afford new Airbus planes.

The investigations followed concern that Airbus had failed to disclose the use of middlemen in such deals.

The US also requested information from the UK and French investigations, amid suspicions that arms export rules could have been violated.

This is by far the biggest DPA settlement the SFO has made.

It is the seventh DPA agreed between the SFO and a company since they were introduced in 2013. The total value of all seven is about £1.53bn.

In 2017, engineering giant Rolls-Royce paid £497m plus costs to the SFO to settle a corruption case.

The SFO had found conspiracy to corrupt or failure to prevent bribery by Rolls-Royce in China, India and other markets. The firm apologised "unreservedly" for the cases spanning nearly 25 years.

However, the deals, which are relatively new in the UK, are controversial.

FROM .bbc.com/news/business