Former Unaoil executive sentenced over Iraq bribery worth $1.7bn
A British former executive at Monaco-based oil and gas consultancy Unaoil has been sentenced to three years and four months in jail for bribing Iraqi public officials to clinch $1.7bn worth of oil projects in post-occupation Iraq.
Iraqi-born Basil al-Jarah, Unaoil’s former Iraq country
manager, admitted to paying $17m in bribes to secure contracts to construct oil
pipelines, an oil platform and offshore mooring buoys in the Gulf, as the
war-torn nation tried to shore up a battered economy after the fall of
ex-president Saddam Hussein in 2003.
It is the third sentence handed down by a London judge after
a five-year investigation by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) and United States
authorities into how the prominent Ahsani family, which ran Unaoil, secured
energy contracts for Western blue-chip clients in the Middle East, Africa and
Central Asia.
Former Unaoil managers Stephen Whiteley, 55, and 45-year-old
Ziad Akle have already been sentenced to three and five years in jail
respectively after a London trial.
“This was a classic case of corruption, where powerful men
took advantage of the desperation and vulnerability of others to line their own
pockets,” said SFO head Lisa Osofsky.
Al-Jarah’s lawyer did not immediately reply to requests for
comment.
The SFO investigation originally centred on the Ahsanis, but
failed extradition attempts culminating in a clash in Italy with US prosecutors
over the extradition of Saman Ahsani in 2018 thwarted the agency’s attempts to
prosecute them in the UK.
British prosecutors alleged 71-year-old al-Jarah,
British-Lebanese Akle, and Whiteley, who is British, conspired with others to
bribe public officials at Iraq’s South Oil Company and, in al-Jarah’s case, the
Iraqi Ministry of Oil.
Akle and Whiteley denied wrongdoing. Al-Jarah pleaded guilty
to five offences in 2019 and asked for further offences to be taken into
consideration at his sentencing hearing on Thursday.
Whiteley and Akle, found guilty of conspiring to pay more
than $500,000 in bribes to win a $55m oil contract, plan to appeal against
their convictions, according to their lawyers.
Paul Bond, a 68-year-old former sales manager for former
Unaoil client SBM Offshore, faces a retrial in January after the jury could not
reach a verdict in his case.
Brothers Cyrus and Saman Ahsani, Unaoil’s British-Iranian
former CEO and chief operating officer, await sentencing in the US after
pleading guilty to bribery in 2019.
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