The Hamburg prosecutor's office has charged five people involved in the export of Siemens gas turbines to the Ukrainian Crimea annexed by Russia, which was carried out in violation of sanctions.
Source. This was reported by DW with reference to the German newspaper WirtschaftsWoche.
It is stated that the accused include four Germans and one man with French and Swiss citizenship, including one current Siemens employee.
According to the prosecutor's office, the turbines worth 111 million euros were shipped from the port of Hamburg to St. Petersburg between November 2015 and January 2016.
Officially, it was stated that they would be used in Taman in the south of Russia, but later it turned out that the turbines were installed at power plants in Sevastopol and Simferopol and served to supply Crimea with energy. The Hamburg prosecutor's office believes that the defendants were aware of the intention to install the turbines in Crimea in order to circumvent the sanctions.
According to the prosecutor's office, the defendants acted with the intention of "making an indirect profit from the sale of gas turbines, as well as the prospect of concluding a contract for the maintenance of the sold gas turbines through variable salary components," WirtschaftsWoche notes.
Siemens denies that the company was aware of the intention to circumvent the sanctions. According to the company, it was misled by its Russian customer, Technopromexport. According to a representative of Siemens AG, the company learned only in 2016 and 2017 that several of the turbines ordered for use in Taman in the Krasnodar Territory of the Russian Federation "were moved to Crimea by the Russian partner under a contract without Siemens' consent or knowledge."
In turn, the dpa news agency points out that, according to a Siemens spokesperson, all five defendants deny their guilt.
During the period when the sanctions were circumvented, the Siemens Gas Turbine Technologies division, which deals with gas turbines and is a joint venture with the Russian company Power Machines, belonged to the Siemens AG joint-stock company. One of the defendants still works for this joint-stock company.