A British man has been jailed for 21 months by a Texas, United States of America court for conspiring to channel bribes totalling $180m (£115m) to Nigerian politicians and officials in an international corruption scandal.
Lawyer Jeffrey Tesler, 63, also received two years’ probation and agreed to forfeit more than $148m (£94m) from accounts in 12 Swiss banks and four from Israel.
Prosecutors said the money was traceable proceeds from the bribery.
Tesler, a dual citizen of Britain and Israel, is the second man to have been sentenced for his part in paying bribes to secure huge engineering contracts in Nigeria.
On Wednesday, Wojciech Chodan, a 74-year-old retired sales executive from Somerset, was sentenced to a year’s probation and fined $20,000 for his part in the bribery scheme.
He has agreed to forfeit $726,000 (£461,325) as part of his punishment.
The prosecutions of the pair have been controversial as both were extradited from Britain under contentious legal arrangements between the UK and the US.
Chodan and Tesler were extradited to Texas after losing legal battles in the UK.
Once in Houston, they pleaded guilty to conspiring covertly to bribing top-ranking Nigerian politicians and officials.
Both worked for an international consortium of construction firms seeking contracts worth $6 billion to build a gas plant on Bonny Island off the coast of Nigeria.
Tesler, 63, who operated from run-down offices in Tottenham, north London, admitted that he acted as a middleman for the consortium and routed the payments through bank accounts in Monaco and Switzerland between 1994 and 2004.
US prosecutors discovered that Tesler arranged for $1 million in $100 notes to be loaded into a pilot’s briefcase and then passed on to a politician’s hotel room to finance a political party in Nigeria.
The UK Serious Fraud Office decided to step aside from investigating the corruption allegations, which surfaced more than eight years ago, and let the US government prosecute the two Britons.
Also, the former chief executive of KBR Inc, who oversaw the massive bribery scheme, was sentenced on Thursday to a 30-month prison term.
Albert “Jack” Stanley, 69, an American citizen, was ordered to pay off the final $1.5 million in restitution to his former employer for a separate scam in which he pocketed $10.8 million in kickbacks.
The bribery scheme orchestrated by Stanley was related to KBR’s efforts to develop a liquefied natural gas plant in Nigeria from 1995 to 2004.
Defence attorney, Larry Veselka, told US District Judge, Keith Ellison, that Stanley’s cooperation had led to the largest recovery from a prosecution under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Veselka said the government was able to recover $1.7 billion in fines, penalties and forfeited profits.
Veselka argued that Stanley’s crimes were caused by “ambition, ego and greed fueled by a raging addiction to alcohol.”
He implored the judge to place the former executive on probation so he could continue his work counseling recovering alcoholics.
The defence attorney also asked Ellison to consider the chilling effect a long prison sentence would have on future whistle-blowers.
He noted Stanley was instrumental in helping the government learn the true dimension of the fraud.
Government prosecutors replied that Stanley did not cooperate until after he was charged.
“Mr. Stanley wasn’t a whistle-blower by any stretch,” said federal prosecutor, William Stuckwisch.
Stanley pleaded guilty in 2008 and under the plea agreement he faced up to seven years in prison.
The government agreed to a 50 per cent reduction in the sentence based on his cooperation.
“I am truly sorry,” Stanley told the judge.
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