Switzerland grants aid in bribery case
The authorities are to provide bank details to Britain in a multi-million dollar Nigerian bribery case involving a subsidiary of the United States Halliburton firm.
The case is against a British lawyer suspected of having paid bribes of $133.5 million (SFr153.5 million) between 1995 and 2004 to Nigerian officials on behalf of a consortium of firms for a contract worth $6 billion.
The documents are similar to those already given to France and the United States in the case, which stems back to events in the 1990s involving bribes allegedly paid for contracts to build liquified natural gas facilities in Nigeria.
The ruling rejected appeals from at least one British citizen and a number of firms in Liechtenstein, Gibraltar, Panama and the Bahamas that tried to block the release of the documents.
In February a former Halliburton subsidiary – Kellogg, Brown & Root – pleaded guilty to bribery charges in Houston, Texas, and agreed to pay fines of more than $400 million.
KBR, a major engineering and construction services company, was split in 2007 from Halliburton, the oil services company led by Dick Cheney before his two terms as US vice president.
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