BERLIN – Siemens denied on Tuesday that it has acted in an illegal manner after rights groups accused the German industrial group of selling technology to Iran that could be used to monitor the Internet.
“We have no reason to think that we have not acted correctly or in a legal manner in Iran,” Joe Kaeser, Siemens’s head of corporate finance, said at a news conference.
The Threatened People’s Defence Society, a German human rights group, said telecom equipment maker Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) had “strongly contributed to the repression of the Iranian opposition.”
NSN is a joint venture between Siemens and Finnish telecom giant Nokia.
NSN acknowledged last year that technology it sold to Iran in 2008 could be used to monitor calls, but denied claims it can be used for web censorship.
