Washington  - Siemens Bangladesh, a subsidiary of German corporate giant Siemens AG, has agreed to pay a 500,000-dollar criminal fine to the United States to help settle a global bribery case, US officials said Monday.

The fine is a small part of the 1.3 billion dollars that the Siemens parent firm has agreed to pay to the US and German governments. That sum includes 800 million dollars to be paid in the United States, according to documents filed in US District Court in Washington.

US officials said that Siemens had violated the rules of the New York Stock Exchange, where the German company has been listed since 2001, and its Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. In addition, some of the illegal payments were made from US banks.

According to court documents, Siemens Bangladesh paid 5.3 million dollars in bribes to Bangladeshi officials from 2000-04 to win a 40.8-million-dollar contract to operate a nationwide digital cellular mobile telephone network for the government.

Siemens Mobile Italy was also involved in the project but is not paying any fines.

Most of the bribes in the Bangladesh case were paid to three "consultants" named as co-conspirators in the charges. A small sum of 16,000 dollars was distributed to government officials or their relatives, including the son of a high-level official of the Bangladeshi executive branch, according to court documents.

Also named as co-conspirators were a senior executive of Siemens Bangladesh who went on to work as a senior executive of Siemens Taiwan after 2004, and a German citizen who replaced him in 2004 in Bangladesh.

The documents did not name participants and no individuals were named as criminal defendants.

As part of the mammoth penalty, Siemens Argentina and Siemens Venezuela also agreed to each pay 500,000 dollars in fines to the US.

Siemens Argentina was charged with making 31 million dollars in corrupt payments to Argentine officials to win a contract valued at 1 billion dollars to develop a national identity card.

Siemens Venezuela was charged with paying at least 18.8 million dollars to Venezuelan officials to help build rapid-transit systems in the cities of Maracaibo and Valencia. The total value of all the Venezuelan contracts was estimated at 340 million dollars. (dpa)