Airbus for years conducted a “massive scheme to offer and pay bribes”, involving very senior executives, according to disclosures in courts in Washington DC, Paris and London, as Europe’s aerospace champion agreed to pay €3.6 billion in penalties to regulators in France, the UK and the US.

Many of the bribes were paid through shell companies set up by executives working for an autonomous strategy and marketing unit once described by former chief executive Tom Enders as “bullshit castle”, according to investigators in the three countries.

This unit, which managed a corps of middlemen in export markets, concealed the bribes by creating fraudulent contracts, accepting fake invoices for services never delivered, and creating false activity reports, Airbus admitted in the US.