Red light beckons for Siemens

ELECTRONICS giant Siemens sells many things - kettles, industrial lathes, computers, kitchen ranges - but it has one more thing on offer: an island.

The trouble is that the potential buyers are not the sort the company wants to entertain. So far, the only tangible bids for the £1 million, 976,000 square-metre island of Goermitz in the Baltic have come from brothel keepers who think it would be fun to turn the former sandy holiday isle into an erotic sex spot.

Siemens acquired the island after the fall of communism when it bought the Kombinat Nachrichtenelektronik, a lumbering State-owned electrical company deep in former East German territory at Greifswald. Today, the plant employs 700 Siemens workers making parts for mobile phones and computers for chairman Heinrich von Pierer's firm.

In the days of the kommissars, the children of the State enterprise holidayed on the sandy beaches of Goermitz. It was a condition of sale to Siemens that the island went with it.

But spokeswoman Marion Rigling said: 'It never had a proper place in our portfolio.' The company admits to having had a fair number of enquiries from 'nutters and dreamers' while the local authority is worried about the bordello owners.

'We cannot have this nature idyll turned into a red-light zone,' stormed the local Ostzee News, paper. Siemens has promised talks with the local authority about just who should take over the place, most of which is a nature zone for eagles and sea otters.

'It could be that there is an individual out there who just wants to be able to say I own an island,' said the firm.