By Tassilo Hummel
PARIS (Reuters) – A German court has decided to launch a criminal trial against two former executives of German engineering giant Siemens who are accused of violating sanctions by helping export Siemens gas turbines to Russian-occuppied Crimea, the court said on Friday.
Prosecutors in the German city of Hamburg last year charged four Germans and one Swiss-French citizen with the alleged sanctions violations.
The Hamburg regional court decided to proceed with a trial for two of them, while the prosecution of the remaining three has been dropped because an investigation did not find sufficient grounds to proceed, the court said in a statement provided to Reuters.
The court statement said the prosecutor’s office had appealed the decision to drop proceedings against the three people. Hamburg prosecutors could not be reached for comment.
German judicial authorities have not named any of the people charged in the case.
A spokesperson for Siemens said the company could not comment on active court proceedings, but said the case was not directed against Siemens, and the individuals no longer work for the company.
A Siemens Energy spokesperson declined to comment as the two accused are not current Siemens Energy employees. Siemens Energy was spun off from Siemens after the events that are the subject of the prosecution, and owns Siemens’ former turbines business.
Western companies are barred from supplying energy or power-related equipment to Crimea under European Union and U.S. sanctions that were imposed in response to Russia’s 2014 annexation of the peninsula, which is internationally recognised as part of Ukraine.
Despite the sanctions, Siemens turbines for generating electricity were delivered in 2017 to two power stations being built by Moscow in Crimea.
Siemens said at the time that it had supplied the turbines to a Russian customer with the expectation they would be installed in power plants in Russia, and had been unaware of any plan to send them to Crimea.
(Additional reporting by Christoph Steitz. Editing by Mark Potter)
