Responding to our post about Jeffrey Tesler’s court appearance in Houston earlier this year to plead guilty to conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and a substantive FCPA count, a reader sent a startling note.
The correspondent, who refers to himself as a ‘French FCPA Blog addict for years’ — [thanks from us] — said:
Dear FCPA Blog,
I would just like to add that Mr Tesler is expected to be sentenced in Paris (France) criminal court on 11 June 2012.
His lawyer said Tesler will plead not guilty. He faces ten years of jail for corruption of foreign public officials.
Reminder:
Before the DOJ launched its investigation about the Bonny Island NGL plant (with KBR Halliburton, Technip, ENI Snamprogetti and JGC corp); it was first a French judge, Renaud Van Ruymbeke, who launched an investigation about money laundering with Tri-Star Investments in Gibraltar and links with offshore accounts in Switzerland and Monaco.
Because of France’s lack of political will to pursue foreign public bribery (and most of all French companies when they are bribing abroad), the U.S. Treasury won $1.6 billion thanks to this French judge requesting mutual legal assistance from the U.S.
Another example of the difficulty of multi jurisdictional investigations…
Here is the link to the news story (sorry it’s in French).
Yours sincerely ….
______________________
Editor’s note: Here’s what sourcewatch said about the French judge:
Renaud Van Ruymbeke is the French investigating magistrate probing accusations of large-scale bribery and corruption against Halliburton KBR and Technip SA.
Van Ruymbeke has become one of the world’s top corruption fighters. With fellow magistrate Eva Joly, he investigated the then-publicly-owned French oil company Elf Aquitaine, which was being used as a private slush fund by French politicians and company executives, winning prison sentences for the former Foreign Minister Roland Dumas and the company’s president.
While investigating Elf, Van Ruymbeke discovered a $180 million slush fund, believed by many to have been the conduit for the extravagant bribery of Nigerian officials by the TSKJ consortium.
Van Ruymbeke is also investigating the Bin Laden family financial empire and the possibility that it funneled money to Osama Bin Laden much later than previously claimed. If he discovers such links, the family fortune may be exposed to claims from victims of Osama’s terrorist attacks.
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