PARIS — Airbus will pay $4 billion in fines to settle a lengthy global corruption investigation, a French court announced Friday, removing a legal cloud over the world’s largest plane maker as it seeks to keep ahead of its rival Boeing after the grounding of Boeing’s 737 Max plane. The episode had tarnished the company’s reputation and forced it to make sweeping changes to top management. It also allows Airbus to avoid criminal charges that, if proved, could have crippled its business by prohibiting the company from seeking public contracts in Europe and the United States. Airbus will be subject to three years of “light compliance monitoring” in France, the nation’s anticorruption agency said Friday. “In reaching this agreement today, we are helping Airbus turn the page,” said the French prosecutor, Jean-Francois Bohnert.

Source: New York Times January 31, 2020 18:23 UTC