NBN Co's Quigley plays down Alcatel bribery concerns

08.01.2011
NBN Co chief executive, Mike Quigley, has played down the current controversy surrounding his former employer, Alcatel-Lucent’s, recent $US137 million settlement for bribery cases brought by US authorities.

Speaking at a media event at the company’s Sydney headquarters, Quigley said he was not shocked by the , explaining that the complexity of Alcatel-Lucent’s business was partly to blame for questionable sales activities of French telecommunications giant Alcatel from the 1990s through its 2006 merger with Lucent Technologies.

“Let me stress, Alcatel wasn’t alone in this,” he said. “When you are operating 130 or 140 companies and 60,000 people and a $20 billion Australian company it’s complex.”

“I think in the last three years there has been 44 companies that have been subject to exactly the same thing. Companies like Siemens, GE, Daimler, Fiat, Volvo, Shell… so [Alcatel-Lucent] are one of quite a number of companies who had to at that time take the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act very seriously, but I can tell you it’s a very difficult job to monitor 130 or 140 companies in dozens and dozens of different languages when you have a couple of individuals who commit acts of fraud.”

Quigley said neither himself nor NBN Co chief financial officer, Jean-Pascal Beaufret, were once questioned during the five-year investigation by the US Securities Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice.

“They were not interested in us,” he said. “In that whole time if they had thought we had any responsibility in any way I’m sure they would have contacted us. They never did.”