• Samuelsson unexpectedly leaves MAN

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German MAN, Europe’s third-largest truckmaker, is seeking record 237 million euro in damage claims from former chief executive Håkan Samuelsson and five other former executives, German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung said Monday.

In May 2009 police checking allegations of international bribery raided offices of MAN in several locations in Germany. The company was slapped with a penalty of more than €150 million for years of paying bribes to obtain foreign contracts.

Several top-level executives, including Håkan Samuelsson resigned soon after the raids as part of a wide-ranging management reshuffle. Samuelsson, however, was not a suspect in the probe.

Now MAN's supervisory board, which is headed by Volkswagen's influential supervisory board chairman Ferdinand Piëch, wants to hold Samulesson and the former leaders personally responsible for the damages.

“Probably no one (in a purely financial sense) has felt Piëch’s hardness as much as Håkan Samuelsson,” Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote.

In an emailed statement, the Munich-based truck maker said Monday it mandated an external law firm to examine possible damage claims and would "enforce these claims to the full extent."

"We examined this and regard the claim as unfounded," Samuelsson's lawyer Wolf-Dieter von Gronau from law firm Sernetz Schaefer told Dow Jones.

Håkan Samuelsson was promoted CEO in January 2005. Before that he worked for Swedish truck maker Scania AB from 1977 to 2000. MAN holds a 30 percent voting share in Volkswagen, which controls Scania.