Prosecuter probing possible Nobel bribing

A spokesman for Sweden’s public prosecutor said that it had launched an investigation into members of the Nobel committee for receiving free gifts of trips to China.

The prosecutor had launched preliminary investigations based on the suspicion of passive bribe-taking, the spokesman said on SR radio.

The investigation was prompted by media reports earlier in the week that a leading member of each of the juries for the medicine, physics and chemistry prizes had travelled to Beijing on a state-sponsored trip.

On two occasions, the Chinese Education Ministry, most recently in January 2008, paid for the trips and hotel costs, Swedish radio news reported.

During the visits, committee members were quizzed by reporters, scientists and government officials about how China could win a Nobel prize.

China sees Nobel prizes as prestigious and an important goal for its scientists. In 2002, eight Nobel committee members visited Japan on a similar sponsored trip.

However, Hans Jornvall, secretary of the Nobel Committee at the Karolinska Institute that selects the medicine prize laureates, believed the trips were worthwhile.

Jornvall, who visited Japan, said in his view "it was not wrong that "those who want this information also pay for it" by funding trips.

The committee members currently under suspicion said earlier in the week that they had had second thoughts about the propriety of having accepted the trips, but they denied the charges of corruption.

"Admittedly we are in a grey area here, but with hindsight one sees things differently," a spokesman for the committee members said.

Professor Claes Sandgren, chairman of the Anti-Corruption Institute founded in 1923 that serves as a watchdog against possible bribery, said on radio: "It is good that this is being investigated. There must be an absolutely watertight barrier against all attempts at influencing the Nobel prizes."

Shortly before the Nobel prizes were presented last year, it also emerged that a pharmaceutical company that sell vaccines might have played a role in the choice of German cancer researcher Harald zur Hausen for the medicine prize.