{"id":209,"date":"2008-12-23T03:13:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-23T08:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/itn.mattrock.ca\/2008\/12\/23\/argentina-takes-the-offensive-as-siemens-pleads-guilty-to-corruption-charges\/"},"modified":"2013-02-08T04:01:29","modified_gmt":"2013-02-08T10:01:29","slug":"argentina-takes-the-offensive-as-siemens-pleads-guilty-to-corruption-charges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.iisd.org\/itn\/2008\/12\/23\/argentina-takes-the-offensive-as-siemens-pleads-guilty-to-corruption-charges\/","title":{"rendered":"Argentina takes the offensive as Siemens pleads guilty to corruption charges"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Damon Vis-Dunbar<br \/>\n23 December 2008<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Argentina has refused calls by Siemens to suspend proceedings at the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (<span class='tooltipsall tooltipsincontent classtoolTips18'>ICSID<\/span>) in which a committee is considering Argentina\u2019s request to revise a 2007 award, following the admission that the firm&#8217;s Argentinean subsidiary\u00a0paid government officials in order to obtain a lucrative contract.<\/p>\n<p>On 15 December 2008, Siemens AG, a German corporation, acknowledged that its employees paid government officials in several countries in order to win contracts, and fudged internal records to hide the payments. In a deal struck with U.S. and German authorities, Siemens will pay US$1.36 billion in penalties.<\/p>\n<p>Among the confessions was that Siemens\u2019 Argentinean subsidiary colluded with government officials in order to obtain a contract for a US$1 billion national identity card project.<\/p>\n<p>When that contract was cancelled in 2001, Siemens responded by filing a claim for violations of the German-Argentina bilateral investment treaty. Some six years later, the tribunal awarded Siemens US$217 million in damages.<\/p>\n<p>Argentina is attempting to have the award revised, and will no doubt use\u00a0the Siemens&#8217; confession to bolster its argument that the award should not stand.<\/p>\n<p>Argentina had raised the issue of corruption during the arbitration proceedings, although an effort to submit evidence on the matter was rejected by the tribunal, on the grounds that Argentina had waited too long to do so. However, since the 2007 award\u00a0various investigations and court proceedings in the United States and Germany brought strength to the corruption allegations. In the summer of 2008, a Siemens official admitted in a German court to paying illegal fees in Argentina. Based on this new evidence, Argentina submitted a request to ICSID for a revision of the award, pointing\u00a0to several investment treaty cases in which tribunals have declined jurisdiction on the grounds that the investment was not made in accordance with domestic laws.<\/p>\n<p>Under ICSID rules, a party can request a revision to an award \u201con the ground of discovery of some fact of such a nature as decisively to affect the award, provided that when the award was rendered that fact was unknown to the Tribunal and to the applicant and that the applicant\u2019s ignorance of that fact was not due to negligence.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Following its admission on 15 December 2008,\u00a0Siemens wrote to the ICSID committee hearing Argentina\u2019s request for a revision to the 2007 award, asking for a three-month suspension of the proceedings. However, Argentina has declined this invitation, telling the committee that it wishes to see proceedings\u00a0continue without delay.<\/p>\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\"> toolTips('.classtoolTips18','International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes'); <\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\"> toolTips('.classtoolTips63','Bilateral investment treaty'); <\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\"> toolTips('.classtoolTips67','Energy Charter Treaty'); <\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\"> toolTips('.classtoolTips72','Investment Court System'); <\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\"> toolTips('.classtoolTips100','investissement direct \u00e9tranger'); <\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\"> toolTips('.classtoolTips104','responsabilit\u00e9 sociale des entreprises'); <\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\"> toolTips('.classtoolTips106','asociaci\u00f3n p\u00fablica-privada'); <\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\"> toolTips('.classtoolTips114','Sistema de Tribunales de Inversiones'); <\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\"> toolTips('.classtoolTips116','European Commission'); <\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\"> toolTips('.classtoolTips118','Union europ\u00e9enne'); <\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\"> toolTips('.classtoolTips119','Uni\u00f3n Europea'); <\/script>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Damon Vis-Dunbar 23 December 2008 Argentina has refused calls by Siemens to suspend proceedings at the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (<span class='tooltipsall tooltipsincontent classtoolTips18'>ICSID<\/span>) in which a committee [&hellip;]<script type=\"text\/javascript\"> toolTips('.classtoolTips18','International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes'); <\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\"> toolTips('.classtoolTips72','Investment Court System'); <\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\"> toolTips('.classtoolTips116','European Commission'); <\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":15869,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1924,2059],"class_list":["post-209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-itn","tag-icsid","tag-infrastructure"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iisd.org\/itn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iisd.org\/itn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iisd.org\/itn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iisd.org\/itn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iisd.org\/itn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.iisd.org\/itn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iisd.org\/itn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iisd.org\/itn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iisd.org\/itn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iisd.org\/itn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}