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Technip sets aside $280 million for bribery settlements with multiple countries
On February 20, TechnipFMC, a London-based oil and gas services company, reported in a filing with the SEC that it has set aside $280 million as an estimate for the settlement of investigations by U.S., Brazilian, and French law enforcement authorities regarding potential violations of anticorruption laws in several countries. The company’s predecessor, Technip SA, previously paid $338 million to settle FCPA charges brought by the DOJ and the SEC in 2010.
Former Petrofac oil-services sales executive pleads guilty in U.K. to bribery charges
On February 6, the U.K. SFO announced that a former sales executive, David Lufkin, of an oil-services company, Petrofac PLC, had pleaded guilty in the U.K. to 11 counts of bribery regarding payments made in exchange for winning oil-services contracts in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Lufkin – a British citizen and the former global head of sales for a subsidiary of Petrofac – pleaded guilty to participating in payments of more than $6 million to agents to win contracts worth more than $4 billion in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The SFO’s investigation of Petrofac regarding suspected bribery and money laundering, which was announced in May 2017, is ongoing, but no other officers or employees are currently charged.
Swedish Prosecutor Charges Russian Bombardier Sales Executive with Bribery of Azerbaijan Officials
On Friday, August 18, a Russian employee of Bombardier Transportation AB, a Swedish branch of Bombardier, the Canadian producer of aircraft and train equipment, was charged by a Swedish prosecutor with aggravated bribery. Evgeny Pavlov, a sales executive, is alleged to have bribed a public official in Azerbaijan to win a contract valued over $300 million to supply Azerbaijan with a signaling system for its railways. Pavlov was first detained in March 2017 and has been held in custody since that time. If convicted, he faces six years imprisonment and deportation.
According to a March 2017 report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an investigative reporting network spread across Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America established in 2006 to conduct transnational investigative reporting to expose global organized crime and corruption, Bombardier Transportation AB was suspected of paying “millions of dollars in bribes to unidentified Azerbaijani officials through a shadowy company registered in the United Kingdom,” which the Swedish prosecutor has characterized as having “no employees or business” but which profited substantially in this deal by purchasing equipment from Bombardier Transportation AB and selling the identical equipment to Bombardier’s Azerbaijan affiliate for a profit. According to export records reviewed by the OCCRP, the equipment was delivered directly from Bombardier Transportation AB to Azerbaijan. The report identified the UK intermediary as Multiserv Overseas Ltd., which, according to an earlier OCCRP report is alleged to have ties to Vladimir Yakunin, the former president of Russian Railways, and is alleged to have had similar involvement in a Bombardier contract with Russia.
FORMER UNAOIL EMPLOYEE ADMITS TO PAYING BRIBE FOR LIBYAN GOVERNMENT CONTRACT
As a follow up to its March 2016 reporting about the Unaoil bribery scandal, the Huffington Post recently published an interview with a former Unaoil employee who has admitted to paying bribes to a manager in Libya’s state-owned oil company in order to win a government contract. Lindsey Mitchell, a former Unaoil manager, told the Huffington Post and the Australian newspaper The Age that in the summer of 2009 he was summoned to a meeting with a production manager at Waha, a subsidiary of the Libyan National Oil Company. At the meeting, the production manager provided Mitchell with details relating to an upcoming bid for a $45 million Libyan government contract. Huffington Post reports that “[t]he next morning, Mitchell called Ata, Cyrus and Saman Ahsani, the father and two sons who ran Unaoil. They were pleased. That afternoon, Martin Abram, a Unaoil manager, met Mitchell at the Unaoil staffhouse to deliver an envelope full of cash” which Mitchell delivered to the Waha manager. A few days later, Mitchell resigned. It is unclear whether Unaoil ever won the contract though the manager told Mitchell that “he expected a 5-10 percent kickback ― about $2-4 million ― if Unaoil won the contract.” According to the interview, Mitchell has recently been cooperating with U.S., U.K., Australian, and Canadian law enforcement authorities. Unaoil has denied Mitchells’ allegations and denies paying bribes to foreign officials in order to win deals for its multinational clients. Previous Scorecard coverage on the Unaoil investigations can be found here.
DOJ Declines FCPA Charges Against AstraZeneca Following SEC Settlement
In conjunction with the SEC’s recent settlement AstraZeneca, the U.K.-based pharmaceutical company announced on August 30 that the DOJ has closed its parallel foreign bribery investigation. As detailed here, the SEC settled charges against Astrazeneca for allegedly improper payments made by the company’s wholly owned subsidiaries in China and Russia. Under the SEC settlement, the company agreed to disgorge $4.325 million and pay a $375,000 civil penalty with $822,000 in prejudgment interest. As reported by Reuters, the company issued a public statement stating it was “pleased to have resolution of these matters.”
UK Serious Fraud Office Issues First Deferred Prosecution Agreement with Standard Bank
On November 30, 2015 the United Kingdom’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO), working with the DOJ and SEC, entered into a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) with Standard Bank under the U.K.’s Bribery Act of 2010 regarding payments by two former employees that were allegedly made to bribe members of the Tanzanian government. The DPA represents the SFO’s first-ever DPA and the first use of Section 7 of the Bribery Act, failure of commercial organizations to prevent bribery, by any U.K. prosecutor. As part of this DPA, Standard Bank has agreed to pay a combined $32.2 million in sanctions to the U.K. and Tanzania, and to cover the SFO’s litigation and investigation costs. The DPA also requires Standard Bank’s continued cooperation with authorities and the implementation of certain recommendations from its independent compliance consultants.
In addition to the DPA, Standard Bank agreed to pay $4.2 million to the SEC to settle charges related to the failure to disclose the underlying bribe payments in the bank’s offering documents and statements to potential investors. In light of Standard Bank’s cooperation with the SFO and the DPA, the DOJ reportedly closed its own investigation without bringing independent charges.
Notably, in one of the first examples of the SEC implementing its plan to make more defendants admit to the allegations against them as part of resolutions, Standard Bank agreed to the facts underlying the SEC charges.
Four Sentenced in United Kingdom for Role in Innospec Matter
On August 4, 2014, the United Kingdoms Serious Fraud Office announced that four former executives of Innospec Inc. (formerly known as Associated Octel Corp.) were sentenced following a long-running investigation related to conduct in in Indonesia and Iraq. Three of the four were sentenced to prison terms, with a former chief executive receiving four years in prison after being convicted at a jury trial earlier this year. A former regional sales director received an 18 month sentence following a conviction at trial, and another former CEO was sentenced to two years following a guilty plea. The fourth individual, a former business unit director, received a suspended 16-month sentence following a guilty plea. The sentencing of these former executives comes after Innospec pled guilty in 2010 to FCPA and anti-bribery criminal charges brought by DOJ and the UKs Serious Fraud Office, and after Innospec settled civil charges brought by the SEC. The charges alleged that Innospec, a global specialty chemicals company, had bribed Indonesian and Iraqi government officials to win sales of a gasoline additive after environmental legislation in the US and abroad led to a decline in sales of that additive. As part of the settlement, Innospec paid U.S. authorities $27.5 million, and paid UK authorities $12.7 million. Two of the four individuals sentenced in the UK had also previously settled with the SEC over civil FCPA charges.