Lufthansa said on Saturday it used passenger travel records to find out who in the company was leaking information to the media, but added it had done nothing illegal.
Confirming a report to appear in Der Spiegel news magazine, Lufthansa said it did an analysis of passenger movements in 1999 and 2000 to try to identify who on its 20-member supervisory board was regularly leaking information to a business newspaper.
But a Lufthansa spokesman said examining flight records was legal and only served as a starting point for the company's internal investigation. He said the leaks violated the German Stock Companies Act and there was an obligation to act.
"We were preparing a criminal complaint but that was dropped when the director accepted the consequences and stepped down," said Lufthansa spokesman Andreas Bartels, adding there had been no espionage, eavesdropping nor any surveillance activities.
"Looking at our own flight records of board members to try to find out the source of the leak was legally unobjectionable," Bartels said. "The concrete evidence was later found elsewhere."
The report comes amid a spate of snooping scandals involving Deutsche Telekom and some of Germany's biggest corporations, rattling Germans who have not forgotten the dark Cold War era.
Deutsche Telekom, Europe's biggest telecommunications firm, said it had illegally monitored phone records, reviving chilling memories of communist East Germany's Stasi secret police and even Hitler's Gestapo.
The Telekom scandal is based on a report the firm spied on journalists and directors to find out a leak to the press.
Discount retailer Lidl was also investigated after accusations it monitored staff activity. Rail operator Deutsche Bahn last week denied illegal snooping despite using the same firm as Telekom.
Der Spiegel said that the journalist had met the supervisory board member in a Lufthansa frequent flier lounge at an airport in Hamburg, where the Financial Times Deutschland newspaper that regularly reported supervisory board secrets is based. The report is to appear in Monday's edition of Der Spiegel.
Lufthansa did not confirm those details. But the spokesman said it had not spied on the journalist, although the airline did have the reporter's flight records.
"We didn't investigate the journalist," Bartels said. "We were interested in finding out who was leaking the information from inside the company."
Bartels said it was the leaks that were illegal under German law. He said they had the potential to cause financial damage to the airline and harm shareholders' interests. The leaks stopped after the director stepped down.
"A company has to act to prevent damage," he said. "We had access to the flight data and there was nothing illegal about examining our own flight records."
