By Ben Knight

Slammed for Bribery, Siemens Continued to Ignore Red Flags

Part II of a Two-Part series

"Sometimes, fishing is easier in muddy waters" – Chinese proverb

German engineering giant Siemens, one of the world’s biggest multinational companies, ignored its own red flags for foreign bribery in the aftermath of a major corruption scandal in 2008, according to newly released monitoring reports and other confidential documents.

The warnings involved the company’s use of third-party resellers, who have often served as conduits for bribing foreign officials, according to former company insiders and internal assessments. Evidence from public records in China suggests this practice has continued into recent months, and resulted in the sale of medical equipment to Chinese state-owned hospitals at vastly inflated prices amidst the pandemic. 

The four monitoring reports, which Siemens was obliged to commission from 2009 to 2012, stem from a $1.6 billion landmark settlement of bribery charges by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2008.

The investigation by US and German authorities uncovered over $1 billion of bribes paid to foreign government officials in return for business, in what the SEC called a “systematic practice” spanning decades and virtually every region in which Siemens operated, in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). A main plank of the SEC’s case against Siemens alleged bribery of third-party resellers to advance Siemens’s business interests.

The case marked a turning point at Siemens. In the wake of the scandal, the company increased its number of compliance officers to over 500 worldwide and introduced stringent new internal policies. The moves, together with Siemens’s apparent adherence to the monitoring reports, turned the company’s reputation around. Many then saw the company as a key player in the fight against global corruption.

By 2014, the Secretary-General of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Angel Gurría, was lauding Siemens for playing a “leading role in anti-bribery compliance measures” at an event attended by the company’s Chief Compliance Officer Klaus Moosmayer.

But whistleblower allegations, evidence that Siemens appeared to still be involved in bribery schemes in the Chinese healthcare market, as well as reports of major FBI investigations against Siemens and other companies in Brazil, suggest that these policies may not have been as effective as Siemens portrayed, and as many assumed they were.

The Justice Department historically has withheld monitoring reports from the public, and the DOJ, Siemens, and its monitor, former German Finance Minister Theo Waigel, all fought to keep the contents of the monitoring reports secret. 100Reporters, represented by Davis Wright Tremaine, sued the Justice Department for release of the reports under the Freedom of Information Act, and won their release, in what transparency advocates have called an important precedent.

Both Waigel and Siemens also declined to address specific questions related to this article. In a statement, the company said that it has “an extensive global compliance program designed to prevent, identify, and eliminate corruption,” and that it was “making extensive efforts to identify and eliminate business practices that promote corruption” in China.

“This includes ending the use of sales partners and consultants in the event of misconduct,” the statement said. “Whenever we find misconduct by distributors, we take action, including ending our collaboration with them.”

Timeline

SEC issues complaint alleging Siemens engaged in a "widespread and systematic practice of paying bribes to foreign government officials to obtain business" over several decades, and in virtually every country where Siemens operated.

December 12, 2008

Siemens accepts a plea deal, agreeing to appoint an independent monitor tasked with writing four annual reports, from 2009 to 2012.

December 15, 2008

Monitor Theo Waigel identifies third-party resellers as a particular bribery risk, and recommends a "Special Review" of how the company vets them.

October 2009

Siemens China conducts the Special Review. Compliance officer Meng-Lin Liu cites a number of red flags that should put resellers under more scrutiny.

January 11-29, 2010

Despite concerns, Siemens issues a memo freeing resellers from the heightened vetting in three out of four types of third-party transactions.

June 30, 2010

Siemens fires Liu, after he repeatedly raises compliance concerns and attempts to block the use of questionable resellers.

November 12, 2010

Upon conclusion of his monitorship, Theo Waigel reports that Siemens had "fully implemented" all of his recommendations.

October 2011

The top sales manager at Siemens Healthcare in China, Cao Yong Sheng, ousted over alleged corruption, emails senior staff at Siemens China warning of persistent "huge problems” and risks of bribery in local operations.

January 10, 2013

The Siemens Scheme

The 2008 scandal was of breathtaking scope. “Over time,” the SEC wrote in its complaint, “Siemens developed a network of payment mechanisms designed to funnel money through third parties in a way that obscured the purpose and ultimate recipient of the funds.” The ensuing settlement, in which Siemens pleaded guilty to criminal violations of internal controls and record-keeping regulations, stipulated that Siemens appoint an independent monitor. The company’s choice of Waigel to monitor compliance reflected the importance of Siemens’s reputation and worldwide business to Germany’s political establishment.

 

Of hundreds of pages of Waigel’s reports that were released, most were heavily redacted. 

 

The handful of pages left visible reveal the areas that prompted the former finance minister’s Waigel’s concern at the time: There are chapters dedicated to “anti-corruption training,” “punishing wrongdoing,” and the “tone from the top.” Most significant, given that Siemens has been investigated for corruption in Brazil and China in recent years, are chapters on “third-party risks.” Third-party resellers are widely considered a red flag for potential bribery. In fact, according to a 2014 briefing by the law firm Clifford Chance, over 90 percent of all FCPA prosecutions in China involve third-party agents.

 

Similarly, the Justice Department’s Resource Guide to the FCPA lists among its common red flags “the third party [becoming] part of the transaction at the express request or insistence of the foreign official.” Since Chinese hospitals are state-owned and run, for FCPA purposes, hospital officials are considered government officials.

Red Flags: Attention Optional

Waigel’s initial report alerted Siemens to the bribery risks presented by third parties such as resellers commonly used in China, particularly those designated by the end customer. “[B]usiness counterparties should be screened for red flags, including (but not limited to) . . .  relationships with government officials,” the report noted in a section on General Principles and Best Practices.

Waigel’s initial report made 114 recommendations for changes in Siemens’s compliance practices to prevent bribery. All of those recommendations were redacted in the current release, but a former compliance officer at Siemens Healthcare in China, Meng-Lin Liu, disclosed a crucial one: that Siemens review its internal controls for scrutinizing its business partners, particularly the use of resellers or distributors in contracts that would otherwise be handled directly between Siemens and the purchaser.

A January 2010 “Special Review” of the company’s vaunted system for scrutiny of potential partners, called the Business Partner Tool (BPT), showed that in November 2009, Siemens indeed assembled a team to examine how the company vetted these third parties, referred to as import/export companies in the documents.

When the team interviewed Liu that December, Liu said that he expressed his concerns that Siemens was allowing some business partners to sidestep vetting through the BPT, thus allowing what were, according to Siemens’s own definition, “high-risk” entities to conduct the company’s business in China without proper due diligence. Liu had already sent an email to Bernd Ohnesorge, at the time CEO of Siemens Healthcare in China, in October 2009 raising concerns about the company bypassing anti-corruption assessment in certain deals. It appears that the review team listened to Liu. The Special Review stated that a 2008 decision to “exclude [import/export companies] related to sales and tendering business from the BPT approval” was being reconsidered.

"An organization should take steps to monitor its third-party relationships continuously for corruption red flags and terminate relationships that expose the organization to liability."

Theo Waigel

The team even noted other “red flags” that should, in its view, intensify scrutiny of import/export companies. One red flag was that Chinese hospitals chose a “partner of trust” to buy equipment from and assigned that partner of trust to a respective Siemens unit. Another red flag was that import/export companies used by bigger hospitals were actually former purchasing departments of those hospitals. In both cases, the reselling companies seemingly presented a high risk of corruption. 

In an emailed statement, Siemens did not directly address this review, but insisted that its compliance system was “adequately conceived,” and pointed to Waigel’s positive appraisal of the company at the end of his monitorship.

But the Special Review suggested that important red flags were being missed, according to Otto Geiss, a former compliance officer at various German companies and board member at the European Business Ethics Network Germany (DNWE).



“Of course, if the hospital has an influence on who imports the product I would say right away that kickback payments are being paid,” Geiss said. “What interest could a hospital possibly have in whether Mr. X or Mr. Y. is doing the importing? That means they have an influence on who gets the business.”

Nevertheless, five months later, a memorandum issued by Siemens’s compliance officers reinforced the 2008 decision to ignore such warning signs. The June 2010 memo, sent to Liu among others, declared that the BPT “does not apply to Models A, B, and D where the companies were engaged either by the end-customer or the dealer.” In other words, three of the four different ways that Siemens works with import/export companies in China could be exempt from this heightened scrutiny.

Even after an independent monitor had called out practices at Siemens following one of the biggest corporate fines in history, the company was allegedly telling its compliance officers not to activate enhanced due diligence processes in the face of red flags.


"Briefly, at organizational level, compliance independence was surrendered first, followed by compliance gravity shifted from ethics to revenue, and inevitably, compliance metamorphosed into complicity."

Meng-Lin Liu

Liu had already noticed big price differences between what the import/export companies were charging hospitals for expensive medical equipment, such as MRI scanners, and what Siemens was receiving, and concluded that that the difference was being siphoned off to bribe corrupt hospital officials. He flagged these concerns in a PowerPoint presentation and a spreadsheet he compiled pointing out the deviations, which he showed to senior compliance officers and senior management at Siemens China.

In the ensuing months, Liu was stripped of his responsibilities before being fired, according to a subsequent lawsuit Liu brought against Siemens alleging whistleblower retaliation.

A Siemens spokesman denied that Liu was fired, claiming that he signed a “mutual termination agreement” after a long period of discussion. The agreement in question, included in Liu’s lawsuit, is titled “Notice of Non-Renewal of Employment Contract,” and appears to be a straightforward notification of non-renewal of an employment agreement.

To Geiss, the June 2010 memorandum presented yet another cause for concern.

“Why would I figure out a methodology for red flags and then not apply it? Why would I make a rule, then define all the exceptions, then say, only the exceptions apply?” Geiss said. “Then I don’t need the rule in the first place. If I have four business models, then decide that in three of them the issue of red flags aren’t applied, then that’s not right.”

Geiss found the exceptions are ironic. Siemens was one of the first companies to develop an IT-based Business Partner Tool to help weed out corruption, and built some of the most comprehensive compliance policies and internal infrastructures of the corporate world in the wake of 2008.

The June 2010 memo, signed by two senior compliance officers, also included a rather alarming footnote to one of the business models. Under what was called “Model B,” in which the import/export company is considered an agent of the hospital rather than an agent of Siemens, the officers acknowledge that “it’s not clear to Siemens whether the [import/export company] signs a further contract with the end-customer.” The footnote then admits, “We cannot exclude the possibility that the [import/export company] and the end-customer abuse the structure and make other dealings under the table.”

In other words, the memo expressly acknowledged the risk of bribery, but neither addressed how to prevent it nor how to remedy it if it occurred. 

"The DOJ frequently talks about transparency in FCPA enforcement, but when given a chance to demonstrate transparency it does the exact opposite."

Mike Koehler

In November 2010, after he had already been told that he was being let go, Liu sent an emailed statement to Waigel and the company’s compliance department explaining what he described as “the whole picture.” In it, Liu said he had seen many compliance failures, including “one-time dealers [being employed] without applicable process control/authorization,” “ineffective intermediary management,” and “unqualified distributors . . . approved over the objection of [the] responsible compliance officer.”

The problem, Liu wrote, unfolded in stages. “Briefly, at an organizational level, compliance independence was surrendered first, followed by compliance gravity shifted from ethics to revenue, and inevitably, compliance metamorphosed into complicity.”

Whether Waigel received Liu’s email, and how he dealt with the email in his monitoring reports, is unknown, thanks to the secrecy he and Siemens insisted upon in fighting against their public release. Shortly afterward, he reported that “Siemens . . . is working to implement all 114 recommendations [from his first year report] in a timely manner.” In October 2011, after three years of assessing Siemens’s compliance policy and procedures, Waigel concluded in his final work plan that the German company had “fully implemented all of his Year One recommendations.”

To the letter, Waigel was correct. The monitor had recommended a “review” of the company’s practices involving resellers, which Siemens had, indeed conducted. However, the spirit and intent behind the recommendation–rooting out practices conducive to bribery–appear to have been largely sidestepped in favor of a more passive approach, of reacting only after corrupt actors had been identified by external parties – such as the Chinese courts.

Waigel, who now practices European competition law at a Munich law firm, refused to provide comments for this article, saying that it was no longer possible for him to remember the details of his monitorship. Nevertheless, partly as a result of his role, Waigel has since gained a reputation in Germany as a compliance troubleshooter for major international corporations. In 2017, he was hired by European aviation giant Airbus to check compliance standards, and in February 2021, he was named chairman of an expert commission for auditor Ernst & Young in the aftermath of the recent Wirecard scandal, one of Germany’s biggest-ever cases of corporate fraud.

Despite assurances that the problems at Siemens have been fixed with a comprehensive compliance policy and new controls, how exactly Siemens has responded to these problems remains unclear. That is because the monitoring reports in settlements like this are kept secret by the companies found to have broken the law and the government agencies charged with enforcing it, said Matt Kelly, publisher of the Radical Compliance newsletter.

Kelly emphasized how rare it was that even part of a monitor’s report be made public. “In the 17 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve only found one (other) monitoring report that ever became public,” he said. “They’re highly confidential material.”

For some compliance experts, the way the judicial system dealt with Siemens’s FCPA violations is suspect, particularly in light of Siemens’s subsequent reputation, burnished by the DOJ itself in its 2008 sentencing memorandum, which praised Siemens’s “reorganization and remediation efforts” and maintained that it had “set a high standard for other multinational companies to follow.”

“The DOJ frequently talks about transparency in FCPA enforcement, but when given a chance to demonstrate transparency, it does the exact opposite,” said Mike Koehler, who runs the FCPA Professor website and teaches at several law schools.

Koehler and other experts argue that the public and shareholders have a right to know whether a company’s business is honest.

In fact, transparency has been a mantra of the Justice Department itself. In a 2015 speech on corporate compliance at the NYU School of Law, the head of the Criminal Division, Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell, said, “Greater transparency benefits everyone. The Criminal Division stands to benefit from being more transparent in part because if companies know the benefits they are likely to receive from self-reporting or cooperating in the government’s investigation, we believe they will be more likely to come in and disclose wrongdoing and cooperate.”

Nevertheless, the Justice Department argued the exact opposite in the Siemens case, alleging that releasing the monitoring reports would “decrease the amount and accuracy of information that DOJ received from future monitorships, which will ultimately inhibit DOJ’s ability to reduce corporate crime.” In opposing the release of its compliance reports, Siemens maintained, in part, that its measures to counter bribery amounted to “trade secrets,” whose release could give Siemens’s competitors an advantage.

In the face of Siemens’s apparent inaction, the problem persisted. According to a recently-released Chinese court verdict, in the same year that Waigel concluded his monitorship, a Siemens business manager offered to pay a hospital president in the Anhui district ¥2 million ($300,000) in exchange for help ensuring that Siemens products won bids.  The hospital president who made this confession was convicted of taking bribes from 2004 to 2017.

Two years after Waigel’s monitorship ended, the most senior sales manager at Siemens China blew the whistle on corruption among third-party resellers. In a 2013 email to dozens of senior staff at Siemens China, the manager, Cao Yong Sheng, spelled out his concerns. He asserted that there was a “huge gap between biddings and contracts,” and asked, “Where’s the gap going?”

Sheng, who had been sacked over his own alleged corrupt actions, maintained that Siemens knew full well that intermediaries were overcharging for equipment, building in the cost of bribes to hospital officials.

“It made us very uncomfortable and so worried,” he wrote.

This series was produced in partnership with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, and co-published with the Associated Press.

Go Back to PART 1
Ben Knight

Ben Knight

Ben Knight is a radio and print journalist who writes in English for Deutsche Welle, The Local, Exberliner, and Time Out, and in German for Der Freitag, Fluter, Dummy, and Froh. He lives in Berlin.
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More From the Series

Chapter 1: East Goes West
Chapter 2: Ghana
Chapter 3: Niger
Chapter 4: Senegal
Chapter 5: Sudan
Chapter 6: Ecuador
Chapter 7: Brazil
Chapter 8: Mexico

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Afonso, 28, Congo
Upstairs in one of the big bedrooms of the Scalabrinian Mission Afonso, a 28-year-old migrant from Congo, explained how he came from Kinshasa in 2015 by boat, escaping from the violent conflicts raging in his own country. He hired the service of smugglers and came on a cargo ship with a number of others. He paid for part of the trip by working on the ship. He was left in the coast of Santos, a city 55km away from Sao Paulo. He is now searching for a job.

“K.”, 39, Sierra Leone
At Caritas, a non-profit providing support to refugees and migrants, we met “K” (who asked not to reveal his full name), who had left Sierra Leone three months ago. His grandfather was a chief priest of a secret society for whom it is a tradition to initiate the oldest son of the family when the former elder dies. A Christian and a graduate in Information Technology, “K” refused to take part in the ritual and says he was then targeted. He fled to stay with family in the interior of the country, but was kidnapped and held captive in the forest. One night he managed to escape to the city and met a woman from a Christian organization which provided airplane tickets so he could leave immediately for Brazil.

Jorge, 25, Guinea-Bissau
Jorge is a trained engineer who came to Brazil two years ago, who is now selling counterfeit and smuggled clothes in a local market. His Brazilian girlfriend is now pregnant and he is waiting for a work permit in order to get a job as mason. He said that when Federal Police went to his home address to confirm he was living there - an essential step in the process of issuing a work visa to a migrant - his house mates thought they wanted to arrest him and denied he lived there. It delayed his chance of getting a permit that would allow him a legal and better-remunerated job. The lack of trust in Brazilian law enforcement is a huge issue among refugees and migrants, many say that they rarely provide help or support, but instead only make their lives more difficult.

Abu, 37, Senegal
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Ibrahim, 41, Senegal
Members of the Senegalese community gather in República Square every week for a party, mounting up their own sound system, bringing drums and singing. On the night we visit around 50 people were dancing and chanting traditional Senegalese songs. Later they take a seat and discuss issues important to the community. Ibrahim, one of the group, has a talent for sewing fake Nike and Adidas logos to clothing in an improvised atelier nearby. Although he is a professional tailor and prefers to dedicate his time to his own original work, he says financial pressures meant he was forced to join the market of counterfeit designer-label clothing.

Guaianazes street, downtown Sao Paulo

On Rua Guaianazes there is a run-down mosque on the second floor of an old and degraded building, which is frequented by many African migrants. Outside, the smell of marijuana and cheap crack is inebriating. Crowds gather on the streets in front of the packed bars, while different people ask us if we want cheap marihuana. We enter one bar that has literally no chairs or tables: there is a poster of Cameroon’s most famous footballer Samuel Eto’o on the wall, and a big snooker table in the centre while all around customers gamble, argue and smoke. The bar tender tells us it is a Nigerian bar, but that it is frequented by Africans of all nationalities. Among the offers of cheap marijuana, crack and cocaine, laughs, music and loud chat, you can barely hear to the imam's call. Rua Guaianazes is considered to be the heart of Cracolandia, a territory controlled by organized crime for more than a decade and now reportedly home to some African-led drug trafficking gangs.

Santa Efigenia neighbourhood
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“H”, 42, Angola
“H” is an Angolan woman now living in a house rented from the Baptist church. The area outside the house is a “boca de fumo” - an open drug dealing spot managed by armed guards. “H’s” house is annexed to the church building itself, and is very rustic and simple. She arrived a year ago with two of her children, and also pregnant. She says that after the family of the Angolan president took over the market of smuggled goods in her country, her small import business started to crumble. Her husband and two more daughters are still there. She is currently unemployed, but happy that her young son is studying, although often he comes home complaining about racism at school. “H” does not want him to play with the neighbourhood children, she is afraid he will be drawn to narco-trafficking if he gets in with the wrong crowd. In the long run, she wants to go back to Angola, but only under “a different political situation.”

Lalingé restaurant, Sao Paulo
Arami, the owner of the bustling restaurant Lalingé – which means “The Princess” in her language – has been in Brazil for seven years. She opened the restaurant a year ago so that the African community in the Centro neighbourhood has a place to gather and eat food from their continent. It’s the kind of place people arrive at any time of the night or day, order their food and chat.

Scalabrinian Mission, Canindé neighbourhood
The Scalabrinian Mission in the neighborhood of Canindé provides philanthropic aid to migrants. Soror Eva Souza, the director, says they have helped people from Africa (Angola, Congo, Guinea, Togo, Nigeria, South Africa, Mali, British Guyana, Somalia, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Cameroon and Uganda), North Africa and the Middle East (Syria, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt), Asia (Cambodia, South Korea, the Philippines, Bangladesh), Europe (The Netherlands, Russia, France) and Latin America and the Caribbean (Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Haiti, Cuba). The Mission provides housing, food, clothing, medication and facilities for migrants. They only receive a small amount of financial support from local government, but work to help migrants find a job so they can live independently. Souza says many of those who arrive at the house are ill: some are seriously injured, others sick from the journey or the conditions they were living in before arriving in Sao Paulo. Since 2015, she says she has seen  human trafficking and slavery victims, drug mules, political refugees, and people who have lost their families en route. When we visit 40-year-old Mohamed Ali, from Morocco, was trying to find a job with the support of the Mission.

Clement Kamano, 24, Guinea-Conakry
Kamano was studying Social Sciences at Université Général Lansana Conté when he took part in the protests of September 28th, 2009, which ended up in a massacre with more than 150 people killed. Afterwards, he was repeatedly harassed because of his involvement in social movements. Fearing he might be killed, his father bought him a ticket to Brazil. Now he is a political refugee, who is almost fluent in Portuguese, and who enjoys talking about the sociologist-philosophers Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, even Leibniz and Nietzsche. He is currently applying to join a federal university in Sao Paulo.

What’s “cereza” in Arabic?
In a bright classroom in the centre of Quito, a group of students sit around a whiteboard. “Yo veo la televisión con mis amigos en la tarde,” they repeat after the teacher, “I watch television with my friends in the afternoon.” “Yo tomo el bus par ir al trabajo,” “I take the bus to go to work.”

Around the table are two Syrians who fled the war, one Cameroonian who says he wanted to escape the Anglo-French conflict in his homeland, two Afghans, one a former top-ranking police officer, an Egyptian and a Sri Lankan who wanted to go anywhere where he could make enough money to help his family. Migrants who arrive in Ecuador from Africa, Asia and the Middle East face a steep learning curve: it might be relatively easy to enter the country, thanks to Ecuador’s liberal open-border policy, but finding work here and learning Spanish can be difficult. Today their teacher is translating between Arabic, Spanish and English. “Market”? asks one. “Souk” replies another member of the group, while a fellow student does a quick translation into Pashtu.

Experts say some of those who come through language centres like these are planning on continuing their journey north, others on staying in Ecuador.

A little piece of Nigeria, in Quito
As the night closes in, Grace, a 25-year-old law graduate from Cameroon, dashes between a barbeque out on the street and the kitchen in the small Nigerian restaurant where she is working the night shift, as a television showing an African football league plays in the background. She wears a dark top, and her hair pulled back, as she fans the tilapia grilling on the coals. When she was denied a Canadian visa, despite having a scholarship, she decided she still wanted to leave Cameroon, where she complains of a lack of jobs and opportunities for the country’s English-speaking minority. With three friends, she bought a ticket heading west for Ecuador where she heard she could enter with her invitation to study at a language school. She soon converted to a missionary visa, and now works here and sings in the choir at a church up the hill, teaching Sunday school at the weekends. Like many of her customers, she also wants to travel north to the US or Canada, but only with the correct papers. “If you go without papers and through the jungle, you might be lost. Then my family is lost as well.”

The Afghan police officer
Asadullah, a former police officer, spent 31 years training new recruits and fighting terrorist groups in his country. Among the documents he smuggled out with him is a photograph of him with Robert Gates, the former US Secretary of Defence, paperwork from a training programme at the National Defence University in Washington DC, and training certificate from the George C Marshall centre in Europe, signed by the German defence minister.

His career had been high-profile and illustrious, but while that brought recognition from the Americans and their allies, it also brought him the unwelcome attention of the Taliban and other extremist groups.

For three years before he fled, he says terrorists were calling him saying he needed to end his work with the police. “Come and work with us,” they’d coax. When he refused, someone tried to throw acid on his child at school – that was when he decided to leave.

Today the family are renting a spacious flat in central Quito, with a big beige sofa and swept wood floors. A big TV is mounted on the wall behind him, and one of his children brings in sweet tea and fruits. His wife and six of his children are with him, awaiting a decision from the migration authorities on their asylum case. For the sake of his children – who all speak English – Asadullah wants to go to the US.

“I want to go to America, but it’s a process: it will take a lot of time,” he says. “We have been waiting to get an answer. I only came here because the bad people wanted to kill us. I’m just here so I’m safe.” He considered going to Europe, but considered the route there more dangerous. “Many Afghan people wanted to go to Europe, to Turkey, but many people died in the sea.”

The Artist
Mughni Sief’s paintings once made him a well-known artist in his native Syria: he taught fine art in a top university, and was invited to Lebanon to show his work. But since the war, and his decision to flee, his paintings have taken on a darker tone. One , “Even The Sea Had A Share Of Our Lives, It Was Tough” touches on the horrors so many Syrians have seen as they try to flee to safety.

“This painting is about Syrians crossing the sea to go to Europe from Turkey. I put this fish head and cut the head off to show the culture of ISIS. This here is the boat people,” he explains in his spartan apartment in Ecuador’s capital, Quito. “Syria was empty of people, and there are so many people dying in the sea.”

From the windows of his bedroom-come-studio, you can see the mountains, washing hanging in the sunshine on a neighbours balcony, beige tiles. Behind him the bed sheets – which came with the house – are adorned with images of teddy bears and the phrase “happy day.”

In the corner is a small, rolling suitcase in which he brought his wood carving tools, crayons, and charcoals from Syria: everything from his old life that he dared bring without alerting attention that he was leaving the country. In a small backpack he bought a Frederick Nietshce paperback, a birthday present from a friend, and a book he bought in Syria: “Learn Spanish in 5 days”. He didn’t bring any photos, in case his bag was searched.

Frustrated by restrictions he faced as a Syrian in Lebanon, he started to research other places where he might make a new start. He read that Ecuador was “one of the few countries that don't ask for a visa from Syrians. I had problems leaving Lebanon, and in El Dorado in Colombia but at Quito I came in no problem. The only question was: why are you coming to Ecuador, do you have money? I said nothing about asking for asylum so they just gave me a tourist visa.”

Soon after he made his asylum application, and today, he paints while he waits for a decision. “Before the war I was focused just on humans, on women, but when the war started that changed, and I began focusing on the miserable life that we live in Syria,” he says as he arranges three paintings on the bed. In one, he explains, is a woman who can’ face something in her life, so prefers to stop speaking.

Tricked
Although many of the migrants that make their way to Ecuador are able to travel more independently than those making the journey across the Mediterranean, examples abound of exploitation of some who arrive here. Mohammad, for example. He’s  a 24-year-old from Sri Lanka who first tried his luck in Malaysia, but was cheated by a travel fixer who took his money while promising him a work visa that never materialized. When he was arrested for working without the proper documents, a friend had to come and pay the police to get him out. Travelling west, to Ecuador, after religious violence broke out in his hometown, he says he paid someone he knows to help sort out his travel, unsure of how much he took as a cut. When he flew in, alongside a Sri Lankan family, the agent arranged for him to be picked up by an unknown woman who charged each of them again to take them to a hostel. He is now renting a room from a man he met at the mosque. Every day continues to be a struggle, he said.

“At home, I saw so many troubles each day. I decided to come here thinking maybe things will be good. But I did one week working in a restaurant, they treated me like a slave. For three months I was searching for work. They are good people here but I have no opportunities here. Seven months I have nothing, I’m wasting my time.”