Another Siemens Overspend

The cost of a multi-million pound Government IT project has more than quadrupled, it has emerged.
The 10-year deal signed by the Passport Agency, part of the Home Office, was supposed to cost between £80m and £100m.
But new figures reveal the final bill for the contract with hi-tech firm Siemens is £365m - more than four times the initial quote.

As demonstrated previously by GermanyWatch, Siemens appears to win contracts by undercutting the competitors during procurement processes, knowing that they are just going to push the actual costs to many times the agreed amount. This is just one small example of many.

If you consider the hundreds of similar contracts in every region of the UK, where Siemens' costs quadruple beyond the original budget, you can see how Germany, and Siemens specifically, is a beneficiary of the huge public sector overspend, and a serious contributor to UK debt.

No doubt the Thameslink contract will go the same way, as the Edinburgh Tram contract has previously.

Siemens, with their bribery, corruption, and questionable procurement methods, should be banned outright from UK Government contracts for ten years - EU rules even support such a move. However, Siemens has just moved between E4bn-E6bn to the European Central Bank, (from French banks which they have used to finance their questionable contracts) in a thiny-veiled attempt for preferential treatment. The ECB of course, will now make sure that Siemens gets its full return in any Euro countries in trouble, hence they can afford to run up ridiculous bills with foreign Governments. 

We won't even get started on the risk to security that is Siemens running our Passport system and having access to this data!

In Greece, the Greek party Pasok has called for an investigation into Siemens bribing of four ex ministers – former Defense Minister Akis Tsochatzopoulos and former Transport Minister Tassos Mantelis from PASOK, and former Finance Minister Giorgos Alogoskoufis and former Interior Minister Christos Markoyiannakis! The investigation is to review whether these minister can be held accountable on criminal charges including bribe-taking, money laundering and breach of faith. This is a blinding example of the level of German penetration in foreign governments!

We have it on reliable but unconfirmed authority, that various German firms were cleverly using French banks to finance fraudulent, inflated, Greek government contracts. Think about it.


For more details on Siemens contracts, read Data Mining Or Espionage?




For more on Siemens history, read on:

Siemens was the major player in the Nazification of Germany. The company, run by Werner Von Siemens' son, Carl, and then his grandson, Hermann, struggled in the wake of World War I and the Great Depression and had to earn some dough fast. When Hitler rose to power in the 1930s, it was the signal for the Siemens executives to start building factories, and nowhere was the real estate better than near the homey neighborhoods of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Hundreds of thousands of slave workers were employed to build all sorts of goodies for the German military to use on both the western and the eastern fronts. Though they weren't the only company at the time supplying the German war effort, they were certainly the most prolific. Siemens was in charge of Germany's rail infrastructure, communications, power generation ... the list goes on. If the Reichstag was the brain behind the war, Siemens was definitely the right hand that stroked Hitler to ecstatic glory.

Internationaly, Siemens was the major Nazi front for espionage and fifth column activity, noted in newly declassified MI5 files from the time as "rabid" Nazi activity.

So how evil were they?
We'll let you be the judge. At the height of the Nazi terror during the 1940s, it was not atypical for a slave worker to build electrical switches for Siemens in the morning and be snuffed out in a Siemens-made gas chamber, and burned in a Siemens-made oven in the afternoon.

Why else would the Allies destroy four-fifths of the company's factories during the war? Because they were bored? No. It's because they intended to blitz the marque brand of Nazi Germany back into hell where it belonged.

These days Siemens is being forced to pay due to a series of lawsuits from survivors. So, at least they own up to it, right?

Well, a few years ago, in an act of insensitivity so colossal it could blot out the sun, Siemens tried to trademark the name "Zyklon" with the intent of marketing a series of products under the name. Including gas ovens.