Airbus to pay €3.6bn to settle corruption probe

European planemaker Airbus will pay €3.6 billion to settle corruption probes by US, British and French authorities into contract dealings, lifting a legal cloud that has hung over the world's largest aircraft maker for years.

Announcing the agreement – effectively a corporate plea bargain – France’s financial prosecutor said the company had also agreed to three years “light compliance monitoring” by the country’s anti-corruption agency.

The simultaneous settlements in Britain, France and the United States mean the European planemaker has avoided criminal prosecution, though it was not immediately clear whether any individuals could still face charges.

“In reaching this agreement today, we are helping Airbus to turn the page definitively” on corrupt past practices, French prosecutor Jean-François Bohnert said, adding that the group could now “now look to its economic future with serenity”.

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As part of the deal, Airbus has reached an agreement to settle corruption charges with France for €2.08 billion, the French financial prosecutor, Parquet National Financier said. The planemaker would also pay a €525.65 million fine to US department of justice and €983.97 million to Britain’s Serious Fraud Office.

The deal, believed by anti-corruption experts to be the largest ever in a bribery case, ends an almost four-year crisis that led to a sweeping management overhaul and delayed plans to redeploy the plane giant’s cash surplus.

While the size of the penalty is large, criminal charges would have risked the company being barred from public contracts in the United States and European Union – a massive setback for one of Europe’s top defence and space firms.

At the centre of the case was a decades-old system of third-party sales agents run from a now-disbanded headquarters unit which at its height involved some 250 people in parts of the world and several hundreds of millions of euro of payments a year, sources familiar with the matter have said. – Reuters