Warning Siemens

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi last week announced plans to build a nuclear reactor for a water desalination plant in the north African country.

The deal has been criticized by German and EU officials, who see the plan as a threat to nuclear non-proliferation efforts.

Siemens owns a third of the company that is expected to supply the nuclear technology, Areva NP, leading German politicians to call on the company to rethink its involvement.

"We must know what Siemens will say about this immoral deal," Michael Müller, a Social Democrat and the parliamentary state secretary at Germany's environment ministry, told Handelsblatt newspaper.

He added that similar deals are often organized via foreign subsidiaries.

"There are a lot of strange cases like this in the atomic energy sector," Müller said.

Playing with fire?

He received backing from Margareta Wolf, the foreign affairs spokeswoman of the opposition Greens party.

"Siemens would be wise in terms of its image and its responsibilities not to play with fire with this," she told the paper.

Siemens declined to comment on the story, telling Handelsblatt reporters to contact Areva NP instead.

Germany this week stepped up criticism of the nuclear deal between Paris and Tripoli, saying neither the EU nor Berlin had been informed of the plans.

Ruprecht Polenz of the Christian Democratic Party (CDU) said the nuclear deal was "a bitter pill to swallow for the EU."

In an interview with German paper, Tagesspiegel am Sonntag, Polenz said it sent a wrong signal to the Middle East. He criticized France's unilateral move, saying it weakened Europe's capability to act on the foreign policy front.

The German government's deputy press spokesman, Thomas Steg, however rejected reports suggesting the deal would put a strain on Franco-German relations.

"The Franco-German relationship is excellent," Steg said, pointing out that unlike Iran, Libya had stressed its willingness for international cooperation and underlined it would not use nuclear technology to produce weapons.