Prime Minister Julia Gillard has serious questions to answer about the Alcatel-Lucent bribe scandal and the appointment of two of the firm's former executives to run Australia's national broadband network (NBN) rollout, the federal opposition says.
The French-based telco has agreed to pay $US137 million ($A136.71 million) in fines and penalties to settle US charges that it paid bribes to win contracts in Latin America and Asia.
Mike Quigley, head of NBN Co, the company responsible for rolling out the network, and his chief financial officer Jean-Pascal Beaufret were previously senior executives at Alcatel-Lucent but played no part in the bribe investigation.
But federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says question marks now hang over the NBN's management.
"The regulatory authorities found that Alcatel was bedevilled with lax management and practices," Mr Abbott told reporters in Sydney on Saturday.
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"That's how these bribes were paid. That's how people were able to get away with paying these bribes.
"And this means there are serious questions for the government to answer.
"Can we be confident that the national broadband network is being administered better than Alcatel was ...?"
He said Ms Gillard must tell Australians what she knew about the problems at Alcatel.
'No involvement'
NBN Co on Friday rejected any suggestion Mr Quigley and Mr Beaufret were involved in the scandal.
It said neither man was contacted nor interviewed in relation to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation.
"In fact, the actions of a number of individual Alcatel-Lucent employees detailed in the SEC's statement fell outside the accountability and jurisdiction of both Mr Quigley and Mr Beaufret," it said in a statement.
"Neither Mr Quigley nor Mr Beaufret played any part in the decision-making process at NBN Co which led to Alcatel-Lucent being selected as a supplier to the company."
The SEC alleged that Alcatel's subsidiaries used consultants who performed little or no legitimate work to funnel more than $8 million in bribes to government officials in order to obtain or retain lucrative telecommunications contracts and other contracts.
All of the bribery payments were undocumented or improperly recorded as consulting fees in the books of Alcatel's subsidiaries and then consolidated into Alcatel's financial statements.
The subsidiaries bribed government officials in Honduras, Costa Rica, Malaysia and Taiwan, the SEC alleged.
