Danish Defence Minister Troels Lund Poulsen has brushed aside corruption suspicions about Ukrainian arms manufacturer Fire Point, the first company to start production under Denmark’s €1.4 billion scheme to support Ukraine’s defence industry. 

“Based on what I have been informed, we have no reason to believe there is a problem,” the minister told the press last week, as he refused to stop working with Fire Point over the corruption investigation.

The Kyiv Independent reported at the end of August that Ukrainian weapons manufacturer Fire Point is being investigated for corruption by Kyiv’s anti-corruption agency, NABU. 

The allegations suggest the company has been inflating its delivery numbers to Ukraine’s military to secure large shares of its budget – almost a third of the defence ministry’s drone budget in 2024 – according to the same report.

After this, editor-in-chief Olga Rudenko posted on Facebook that Fire Point had written to her her with the threat of legal action.

The following day, Bloomberg reported that Fire Point would be the first company to benefit from a €1.4 billion Danish scheme for Ukrainian companies to open production lines in Denmark.

After a meeting of EU defence ministers in Copenhagen at the end of August, Lund Poulsen told the press Denmark would invest €1.4 billion in the scheme this year, with the first company expected to start production within “some weeks” and others to follow “later this year”.

Fire Point attracted widespread attention in the summer after news broke of its Flamingo missile, which the company claims has a range of 3,000 km – enough to strike targets deep inside Russia.

 Whether or not the company is found to have done anything wrong, it seems the Danes believe they can use their corruption-free reputation to train Ukrainian companies and prevent any new cases of corruption.  

“It’s about how they behave now (…) and that we in Denmark are prepared to handle the cases that may arise”, Jesper Olsen, chairman of the Danish branch of Transparency International told Berlingske last week about cooperation with Ukrainian arms makers. 

And Lund Poulsen expressed faith in his country’s laws, saying that ultimately, “a company that is established in Denmark must comply with Danish rules”.

(cp, aw)