Deutsche Bahn sacks employees in foreign bribery scandal

German national rail provider Deutsche Bahn has begun firing employees at their subsidiary DB International following an international corruption scandal, the company said on Thursday.

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“We have separated ourselves from a number of leading employees in middle management,” a spokesperson told daily Berliner Zeitung.

The DB International workers are suspected of bribing foreign decision makers in Algeria, Rwanda, Greece and beyond to gain contracts.

“The suspicion of illegal payments has hardened so that we’ve taken the first difficult consequences,” the spokesperson said.

In addition to sacking the workers suspected of wrongdoing, other related contracts with consultants and freelancers have ended.

The spokesperson estimated that the alleged payments amounted to the “middle-single-figure millions,” the paper said.

The bribery cases are believed to date back as far as 2005, and the company informed the Frankfurt public prosecutor’s office last year about its suspicions, discovered during internal review.

Deutsche Bahn also hired professional services firm KPMG to perform a special investigation into the subsidiary.