Two Deutsche Bahn engineers warned as early as 2016 that the German state railway giant's underground station project in Stuttgart was rife with corruption that cost taxpayers hundreds of millions, media reported Thursday
BERLIN (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 25th November, 2021) Two Deutsche Bahn engineers warned as early as 2016 that the German state railway giant's underground station project in Stuttgart was rife with corruption that cost taxpayers hundreds of millions, media reported Thursday.
The Financial Times reported receiving the whistleblowers' memos claiming senior managers had commissioned superfluous work that had "unnecessarily deprived" DB of at least 600 million Euros ($673 million) over the years.
On one occasion, a complaint mentioned a 2.5-million-euro electrical substation that the engineers' superiors wanted to be awarded to a contractor, while an alternative solution would have only cost 30,000 euros.
The employees tipped off the DB's compliance department about possible kickbacks that managers received in return for commissioning unnecessary work. An internal probe found no wrongdoing, but one of the whistleblowers was fired and the second one cut contacts with auditors.
The underground railway station in the main city of Baden-Wuerttemberg is believed to be Europe's largest and most expensive infrastructure project. Its total cost has gone up from the initial assessment of 2.5 billion euros to 8.2 billion and may rise to 10 billion by the time it is finished in 2025.
