British man sentenced in US over bribes to Nigerian government

A Briton has been sentenced to a year’s probation and fined $20,000 by a Texas courtroom for conspiring to channel bribes totaling $180m (£115m) to politicians and officials in an international corruption scandal.
On Wednesday, Wojciech Chodan, a 74-year-old retired sales executive from Somerset, was sentenced for his part in paying bribes to secure huge engineering contracts in Nigeria.

Another Briton, Jeffrey Tesler, a London lawyer, is due to be sentenced on Thursday after pleading guilty last March to his role in the bribery.
The prosecutions of the pair have been controversial as both were extradited from Britain under contentious legal arrangements between the UK and the US.
A series of suspects have been sent to the US under a legal regime which has been criticized for being unfair to Britons.
Chodan’s conviction came on the same day the prime minister announced that Theresa May, the home secretary, will conduct a “proper, sober, thoughtful review” of Britain’s extradition treaty with 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.
Chodan, whose home is in the Somerset village of Nunney, was employed as a sales executive for a subsidiary of Kellogg Brown and Root during the conspiracy. He recommended Tesler as the consortium’s middleman to pay the bribes.
Chodan and other conspirators “met with successive holders of a top-level office in the executive branch of the Nigerian government” to discuss how the bribes were to be paid, according to US prosecutors.
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 $1m 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 authorities have seized $148 million from Tesler’s bank accounts. Chodan has agreed to forfeit $726,000 as part of his punishment.
The sentencing this week is expected to mark the end of a protracted effort to prosecute the conspirators for the corruption allegations, which surfaced more than eight years ago.
The Serious Fraud Office decided to step aside and let the US government prosecute the two Britons.
The Guardian is fighting a legal battle to gain access to official documents which were used to justify the extradition of the pair, but this move has been resisted by the British and American governments.
Over the past three years, US prosecutors have forced five companies from the US, France, Holland and Japan to pay penalties totalling $1.7 billion for participating in the Nigerian bribery scheme.
An American executive, Jack Stanley, is also due to be sentenced on Thursday in what is expected to be end of US prosecutions over the scandal.
In recent years, the American government has made great efforts to prosecute firms and their executives for paying back handers to officials and politicians in other countries to land contacts.
Even firms whose corruption has only been slightly connected to the US have been prosecuted by the American authorities.