Parliamentary oversight investigates the F-35 purchase
Keystone-SDA
The Swiss government and the other responsible authorities must once again answer critical questions about the procurement of the F-35 fighter jets.
+Get the most important news from Switzerland in your inbox
The House of Representative’s supervisory committee has decided to conduct an investigation. The dispute over the fixed price will take centre stage.
The responsible subcommittee of the House of Representative’s Control Committee will lead the investigation, according to a statement from the parliamentary services on Tuesday. It will follow on from its inspection in 2022, when the evaluation process for the new fighter jets took centre stage.
The parliamentary oversight body now intends to focus on the management of the authorities on the issue of the fixed price. The handling of the expert opinions on the fixed price and the information provided by the government to the supervisory authorities and the public will also be scrutinised.
+ F-35 costs ‘were never fixed’: former Swiss audit chief
In recent weeks, it has become known that the US and Switzerland have different interpretations of the fixed price for the 36 fighter jets to be procured. The subcommittee of the House of Representative’s Control Committee wants to clarify whether, in retrospect, shortcomings can be identified in the government’s management during the negotiation of the contracts.
The subcommittee is also interested in examining the appropriateness of the government’s and the defence ministry’s communication with parliamentary oversight and the public. It was not initially known when the first results will be available.
Translated from German by DeepL/ts
We select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools to translate them into English. A journalist then reviews the translation for clarity and accuracy before publication.
Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. The news stories we select have been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team from news agencies such as Bloomberg or Keystone.
If you have any questions about how we work, write to us at english@swissinfo.ch
