Brig. Gen. M. O. Johnson Rtd Julius Berger Chairman.

A German construction group, Bilfinger Berger, has been drawn into allegations of kickbacks to leading officials of the ruling People's Democratic Party in Nigeria in the 1990s, the news magazine Der Spiegel said Saturday.

In a report to appear in its Monday issue, Spiegel said public prosecutors in Wiesbaden, in the centre of Germany, had confirmed an investigation of the company's role in the scandal, which is already being studied by US and French prosecutors. The bribes were allegedly paid by Julius Berger, a Nigerian company in which the German group owns 49 per cent of the shares.

 

At the time, the group was seeking the contract to build a gas- liquefaction plant for Nigeria's gas-export industry.

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Bilfinger Berger is the number-two international construction group in Germany and is expert in big civil-engineering projects. Spiegel quoted Bilfinger Berger saying that it had alerted the German prosecutors itself about the Nigeria issue at the request of US investigators and the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Bilfinger Berger said it did not believe its acts were punishable. Wiesbaden prosecutors could not immediately be contacted Saturday by Deutsche Presse-Agentur