Siemens on Tuesday announced it planned to claim damages from eleven of its former executive board members, including ex-chief executives Heinrich von Pierer and Klaus Kleinfeld, over their role in the bribery scandal that struck the company almost two years ago.

Europe’s biggest engineering group claimed the managers had ”breached their organisational and supervisory responsibilities”, thus failing to stop illegal practices and wide-ranging bribery in a scandal that could potentially cost the engineering group several billion euros.