Ex-KBR CEO Gets 30 Months For Halliburton’s Nigerian Bribe Scheme

February 24, 2012
By Sweet crude

A former
chief executive officer of KBR
Incorporated, Albert “Jack” Stanley,
was sentenced to 30 months in
prison by a US court on Thursday
for his role in the massive, decade-
long Halliburton bribery scheme in
Nigeria.
Top Nigerian government officials
were, under the scheme, allegedly
offered bribes totalling $180 million
by Halliburton, a US oil services
firm, to enable it win $6 billion
Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas
(NLNG) contracts.
Stanley, 69, who pleaded guilty in
September 2008 in the scheme, has
been awaiting sentencing after this
date was reset 16 times.
“The misconduct here was serious,
ongoing and deeply hurtful,” U.S.
District Judge Keith Ellison said
before handing down Stanley’s
sentence, which also includes 3
years of probation.
Earlier Thursday, Ellison gave a
former KBR consultant a 21-month
prison sentence for acting as a
middle-man to channel bribes to
Nigerian officials on behalf of KBR
and three other members of a
Portugal-based consortium called
TSKJ.
Jeffrey Tesler, 63, a consultant and
lawyer, pleaded guilty almost a year
ago to one count of conspiracy to
violate and one count of violating
the bribery law known as the
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA)
.
Despite fighting extradition from
Britain, Tesler was sent to the
United States in March 2011, where
he entered a guilty plea. He faced
up to five years in prison on each
count and had already agreed to
forfeit almost $150 million as part of
his plea agreement.
On Wednesday, Judge Ellison
sentenced another Briton, Wojciech
Chodan, to probation for taking part
in the bribery scheme when he
worked at a unit of KBR. He had
cooperated with the investigation.
Both Stanley and Tesler expressed
remorse for their actions. Stanley
said his judgement had been
clouded by “ego, ambition and
alcohol” and said he cooperated
with the Justice Department since
2004.
Stanley’s lawyer, Larry Veselka,
called him “the most effective and
cooperating witness in U.S. history”
in helping to pursue FCPA violators.
Government officials said Stanley
mislead federal investigators for four
years before he fully revealed the
details of the case. However, the
U.S. government agreed to cut
Stanley’s proposed sentence in half
– to 42 months from 84 months –
based on his cooperation.
“He knew he was in a lot of trouble
before he started cooperating,
right?” Ellison asked.
“Mr. Stanley wasn’t a whistle-blower
by any stretch,” said government
prosecutor Patrick Stokes. “Mr.
Stanley was the leader of a gigantic
fraud.”
KBR was previously a unit of oil
services firm Halliburton but was
spun off in 2007 and in 2009
agreed to pay $579 million to settle
bribery allegations.
Kellogg Brown & Root LLC, the
former engineering subsidiary of
Halliburton Co, pleaded guilty in
2009 and admitted that it paid $
180 million in bribes to Nigerian
officials to win the $6 billion in
contracts for the Bonny Island LNG
project in the Niger Delta. Partner
companies from Italy, France and
Japan were involved.
The bribes – some delivered in a
briefcase stuffed with $100 bills –
were paid to officials in Nigeria’s
executive branch as well as the
state-owned Nigerian National
Petroleum Corp, the U.S. Justice
Department has said.
At various points, huge sums of
money were wired through banks in
Amsterdam and New York to
accounts in Monaco and
Switzerland.