(Bloomberg) — Ericsson may have made payments to the ISIS terror organization to gain access to certain transport routes in Iraq, the company’s chief executive officer Borje Ekholm told newspaper Dagens Industri.
Speaking in an interview with the business daily, the CEO admitted that Ericsson had identified “unusual expenses dating back to 2018” but the company hasn’t yet determined who the final recipient of the money was. “But we can see that it disappeared,” he said.
His comments follow a statement by the telecommunications equipment manufacturer late on Tuesday, in which the company said that it continues to “invest significantly” into a probe regarding compliance concerns in its Iraq-based operations.
A spokesperson for Ericsson declined to comment when contacted by Bloomberg News.
The suspect payments likely formed part of a corruption probe by the U.S. Department of Justice that was concluded in 2019, according to analysts at Handelsbanken. And while the analysts don’t expect the revelations to trigger further investigations, “it is likely to harm the stock price” when trading starts, they wrote in a client note.
Ekholm told the newspaper that Ericsson has spent “considerable resources trying to understand this as best we can. Financing terrorism is completely unacceptable and something we do not allow at all.”
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