In June 2019, Volkswagen listed its bus and truck division in the new company Traton in Frankfurt and on the Stockholm Stock Exchange.
Traton mainly includes Swedish Scania and German MAN.
The IPO was then Europe's second largest that year.
But in the so-called prospectus, where potential shareholders must be informed about the company and any risks, there was no information about the corruption India that Scania's internal investigators came to the year before.
The information was recently revealed in SVT News and Assignment Review in collaboration with the German public service company ZDF.
Concise information in the prospectus
Volkswagen owns approximately 90 percent of the shares in Traton.
AMF is the second largest owner with around three percent of the shares.
Neither AMF nor the other owners who bought shares in Traton in the summer of 2019 found out anything about Scania's corruption investigation via the prospectus.
The prospectus, which is the comprehensive report that investment banks must publish before an IPO, contains only scant information that Scania has completed its bus production and sales in India.
But it does not say anything about the conclusions about the systematic bribery culture that Scania seems to have been involved in for several years.
Nor does it say in the prospectus that two of Scania India's top executives were forced to resign in 2018 according to the information in the internal reports.
What must be included in a prospectus is regulated in an EU regulation.
The standard wording in Traton's prospectus does not provide any information to prospective shareholders that management already in 2018 knew detailed information about suspected corruption in India.
According to Scania, this contributed to the company withdrawing from the Indian bus market.
"Will ask for an explanation"
AMF's Anders Oscarsson will shortly request a meeting with Scania's CEO Henrik Henriksson to ask questions about the choice to omit the information.
- What we will do is at the next meeting ask for an explanation.
One question I will ask is "How did you think here?", Says Anders Oscarsson.
In an email to SVT, Traton writes that the prospectus mentions general potential risks in several areas regarding the area of corruption.
But that "there was no legal obligation to disclose the specific risks related to Scania India".
In an email to ZDF, Volkswagen writes that any future financial costs for investors due to the corruption deal are not so great that they needed to be mentioned.