Securities and Exchange Commission v. Sharef

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) (plaintiff) sued Herbert Steffen, Bernd Regendantz, Uriel Sharef, and several other former senior executives of Siemens Aktiengesellschaft (Siemens) (defendants) in federal district court for violations of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Siemens’s headquarters were in Munich, Germany. The SEC alleged that between 1996 and 2007, Siemens paid about $100 million in bribes to Argentine government officials to secure a contract to create Argentina’s national identity cards, and almost one-third of the payments occurred after Siemens became subject to the Securities Exchange Act. As part of the scheme, Siemens made false certifications in SEC filings. Steffen was a 74-year-old German citizen who worked extensively for a Siemens subsidiary in Argentina. Sharef recruited Steffen to facilitate the bribe payments because of Steffen’s well-established connections in Argentina. Steffen met several times with Regendantz, Siemens’s chief financial officer, to pressure Regendantz to make payments to Argentine officials. Regendantz authorized a $10 million bribe only after Sharef and other higher-ups approved it. Steffen did not authorize the bribe, was not present when it was paid, and seemed uninvolved in Siemens’s cover-ups of the bribery or falsifications in SEC filings. Steffen moved to dismiss the SEC complaint, asserting that the court lacked personal jurisdiction.