InfoBytes Blog
Jury convicts former French power company executive of multiple FCPA, money laundering and conspiracy offenses
On November 8, the DOJ announced that a jury had returned a guilty verdict against a British national and former French power and transportation company executive who was accused of bribing Indonesian officials to secure a power contract. Following a two-week trial, the jury convicted the former executive on six counts of violating the FCPA, three counts of money laundering, and two counts of conspiracy. As previously covered by InfoBytes, while the French company pleaded guilty in 2014, and three other executives—each of whom worked for the French company’s U.S.-based subsidiary—entered guilty pleas, the trial for the former executive (originally indicted in 2013) was delayed as he challenged the reach of the FCPA. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held in 2018 that a non-resident foreign national lacking sufficient ties to a U.S. entity could not be charged with conspiring or aiding and abetting something that he could not be directly charged with, because he was “not an agent, employee, officer, director, or shareholder of an American issuer or domestic concern” within the scope of the FCPA’s jurisdictional provision and had not himself committed a crime inside the U.S. The 2nd Circuit also determined, however, that the former executive could still be charged with FCPA offenses, as the DOJ had signaled its intention to prove he “was an agent of a domestic concern,” which would place him “squarely within the terms of the statute.”
According to the DOJ’s press release, it presented evidence at the trial to show that the former executive violated the FCPA by overseeing and supporting the U.S.-based subsidiary’s efforts to win the contract with the bribery scheme, including pressing the U.S. subsidiary to structure the payment terms to a consultant used as an intermediary in the scheme to “get the right influence.” The former executive and his co-conspirators allegedly helped arrange the payment of bribes to Indonesian officials by assisting in the U.S. subsidiary’s retention of two consultants, purportedly to provide legitimate consulting services on behalf of the subsidiary but with the intention of employing them to pay and conceal the bribes. The DOJ observed in its release that the former executive and his co-conspirators were successful in securing the contract from Indonesia’s state-owned and state-controlled electricity company and “subsequently made payments to the consultants for the purpose of bribing the Indonesian officials.”
Sentencing is scheduled for January 31, 2020 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut.