The suicide of Siemens AG’s ex-finance chief in February made headlines all over the world. Heinz-Joachim Neubürger had faced a 15 million-euro judgment from a Munich court for not doing enough to stop a massive bribery scheme at the engineering giant. A reduced penalty, a 2.5 million-euro settlement, was approved by Siemens shareholders days before Neubürger jumped from a Munich railroad bridge.
His death was a tragic reminder of the pressures faced by defendants in financial scandals. But Neubürger’s most enduring legacy is likely to be the 2013 Munich ruling against him, which offered a sobering lesson for German corporations and the law firms that advise them. The ruling blamed individual Siemens managers for failing to implement and monitor an effective compliance system that would root out corruption. And for the first time ever, a German court detailed exactly what such a system should include.
