The Hamburg prosecutor’s office has charged five people with exporting Siemens gas turbines to Russian-annexed Crimea in violation of sanctions.
.in_text_content_22 { width: 300px; height: 600px; } @media(min-width: 600px) { .in_text_content_22 { width: 580px; height: 400px; } }
The dpa news agency reports that among the accused are four Germans and one person with French and Swiss citizenship, including one current employee of Siemens. According to the prosecutor’s office, turbines worth 111 million euros were shipped from the port of Hamburg to St. Petersburg between November 2015 and January 2016.
It was officially announced that they would be used in Taman in southern Russia, but it later turned out that the turbines were installed at power plants in Sevastopol and Simferopol and served as an energy supply for the occupied region of Ukraine. The Hamburg prosecutor’s office believes that the defendants knew about the intention to install turbines in Crimea in circumvention of sanctions.
According to the prosecution, the attackers acted with the intention of obtaining “indirect profits from the sale of gas turbines, as well as from the prospect of concluding a contract for their maintenance,” notes WirtschaftsWoche.
At the same time, Siemens denies that it knew about the intention to circumvent sanctions. They claim that the company was allegedly misled by the 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 the Krasnodar region of Russia “were moved to Crimea by a Russian partner without the consent of Siemens.”
According to a Siemens official, all five defendants deny their guilt.
At the time the sanctions were circumvented, the gas turbine division of Siemens Gas Turbine Technologies, a joint venture with the Russian company Power Machines, belonged to the joint stock company Siemens AG. One of the accused works in this joint stock company to this day.
Later, the division became part of the separate concern Siemens Energy, and after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it was sold.
Source: Racurs
I am David Wyatt, a professional writer and journalist for Buna Times. I specialize in the world section of news coverage, where I bring to light stories and issues that affect us globally. As a graduate of Journalism, I have always had the passion to spread knowledge through writing.