Greens Get Six Months In Jail

Patricia Green, with her husband Gerald The husband-and-wife Hollywood movie producers convicted of bribing a Thai government official were each sentenced to six months in jail and six months home confinement yesterday by a federal judge in Los Angeles.

Gerald Green, 78, and Patricia Green, 53, were also ordered to each pay $250,000 in restitution.

Judge George H. Wu had delayed the Greens’ sentencing five times. Prosecutors first argued that the federal guidelines called for sentences of around 20 years in prison. In a brief filed this week, they asked for ten-year jail terms. The Greens’ lawyers had argued for no jail time.

The Greens were convicted last year after a jury trial of paying $1.8 million in bribes from 2003 to 2007 to Juthamas Siriwan, governor of the Tourism Authority of Thailand and the president of the Bangkok film festival. In exchange, prosecutors said, the Greens obtained contracts worth about $13.5 million to produce the film festival.

The couple’s six-month prison terms are the most lenient in recent FCPA cases.

In April this year, a Virginia man was sentenced to 87 months in prison after pleading guilty to conspiring to violate the FCPA by making corrupt payments to government officials in Panama and giving a false statement to the FBI about how he paid some of the bribe money. Charles Jumet’s sentence is the longest FCPA-related prison term ever imposed.

Jumet’s co-conspirator, John Warwick, was sentenced in June to 37 months in prison. He also received two years of supervised release following his prison term and forfeited $331,000 in proceeds of the crime.

In April last year, the Virginia-based physicist who sold controlled space-launch technology to China by bribing government officials there was sentenced to 51 months in prison. Shu Quan-Sheng pleaded guilty in 2008 to one count of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and two counts of violating the Arms Export Control Act.

Frederic Bourke was sentenced to a year and a day in prison and fined $1 million for investing in a bribe-tainted deal in Azerbaijan and then lying to FBI agents about it. He was convicted in 2009 by a Manhattan jury of conspiracy to violate the FCPA.

And last month, Juan Diaz, a Miami businessman at the center of the Haiti telco bribery case, was sentenced to 57 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release. He pleaded guilty in 2009 to a one-count criminal information charging him with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and money laundering.

The Greens were found guilty of conspiring to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, nine counts of violating the FCPA, and seven counts of money laundering. Patricia Green was also found guilty of two counts of signing a false U.S. income tax return. The conspiracy and FCPA charges were each punishable by up to five years in prison, the money laundering counts by 20 years in prison, and the tax charges against Patricia Green each carried a maximum penalty of three years in prison.

The Thai official involved in the case, Juthamas Siriwan, and her daughter were indicted by a federal grand jury in LA in January this year. They were charged with one count of conspiracy, seven counts of transporting funds to promote unlawful activity (bribery), and one count of aiding and abetting. If convicted, they each face up to 20 years in prison.

Gerald Green has emphysema and has appeared in court with an oxygen bottle to help him breathe. The judge had ordered production of his medical records. At a series of post-trial hearings, Judge Wu had also asked prosecutors and defense lawyers to talk about penalties handed out in similar cases.